


Paying the Price

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-10 07:35:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 60,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2016477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hal's past comes back to haunt him, and he needs a favor from the last person in the world he wants to ask, with unforeseen consequences.</p><p>Amazing art inspired by this work:</p><p><a href="http://evinist.tumblr.com/post/103165022276/a-short-comic-inspired-by-fabula-unicas-wonderful">Chapter 13 (Barry's message)</a> by Evinist</p><p><a href="http://evinist.tumblr.com/post/94977620061/no-no-no-no-do-not-let-him-into-your-head">Chapter 13 (Do not let him into your head)</a> by Evinist</p><p>and</p><p><a href="http://myteaplease.tumblr.com/post/93937957005/quick-doodle-for-the-purpose-of-relieving-feelings">Chapter 12 (Do you want a towel)</a> by myteaplease</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hal changed his tie three times, considering each one in the mirror before balling it up and throwing it aside in disgust.

That was his mistake: he had thought choosing the tie would be the easy part, and he had left it for last. That was one of the best things about his life, was how little thought he had ever had to put into his clothes. Dress uniform or flight suit, those defined the poles of his sartorial existence. A great life, but it left you fundamentally unsuited to selecting a tie in a moment of great importance. 

"You look like an asshole," he said to his reflection, which just glared wan and tight-jawed back at him. "Also, you should get some sleep."

He swallowed a cup of coffee while standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the clock. His apartment was quiet. He rinsed his coffee cup, put it in the sink, and checked his watch again. There was an article on the second page of the Sports section he wanted to read on the bus, so he folded the paper to that page and tucked it under his arm. He locked his apartment and walked to the bus stop three blocks west. 

He took the bus to the train. Fifty minute ride to the station, then forty-five minutes on the train. An easy trip, though, with only one change. He had more than enough time for his article, and for all the rest of them, by the time he arrived. The train station was downtown, and he walked from there to his destination; the cab would have been a waste. He'd been in this city enough to know his way around.

He was still half an hour early, even with the walking. That was irritating, because he thought he had timed it to just fifteen minutes early. He liked sticking to itineraries. That was another indelible mark of the military life. So he walked the block three times, checking his watch with each circuit. Finally he pushed back the huge brass doors, into the chill air and slick marble of Wayne Tower's soaring rotunda.

"Excuse me," he said to the security guard behind the desk. The desk was situated several steps above, and the large phlegmatic man in the white shirt looked down at him. "I have an appointment with Mr. Wayne. What floor is that on?"

The man didn't answer him. He just looked at him, and then he picked up a phone, murmured something into it which got buried in his jowls, and put the phone down. He hauled himself up, lumbered to the bank of glistening elevators, and turned a key in the panel of buttons.

"Okay," Hal said. "So should I just—"

The man gestured into the elevator car, and lumbered back to the desk. Hal got in and let the elevator whoosh him to the forty-fifth floor. This floor was as unlike the vast chilly spaces of the rotunda as it could possibly be: soft carpets, leather furniture, a smiling woman at the desk. Even her smile looked expensive.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Jordan," she said. Her voice was as warm as the sunlight on the leather sofa. "Would you like some coffee while you wait?"

"I'm good, thanks."

"Would you like to take a seat for a few moments? I'm afraid Mr. Wayne may be just a minute. He had an unexpected call."

"Okay, no problem." He sat on one of the sofas by the wall. There was a large stone fireplace here, though it was filled with potted plants, since it was the middle of summer. The good-looking woman behind the desk kept working. Her chignoned hair was as sleek as her smile. She glanced up at him only once, and in that glance he could tell she was tallying exactly how much his suit had cost. 

After about twenty minutes he was beginning to regret ditching his newspaper at the train station. The secretary looked up and smiled, like she had read his mind. "May I bring you a newspaper or something to read while you wait, Mr. Jordan?"

"Uh, no, I'm good, thanks."

"There's a pad on the table, if you would prefer to read that way."

It took him a second to figure out what she was talking about, but she was right, there was a gleaming new WayneTech tablet resting on the glass coffee table in front of him. "I'm good," he said again. Her smile only deepened. He was beginning to figure out what she meant by the smile, and it was not very nice.

He tried not to fidget, but once he had announced his decision not to read anything, he felt he couldn't go back on it. He was dug in now. He had to tough it out. She was just waiting for him to give in, probably. He tried some of the meditation techniques Kilowogg had taught him, but he stopped when he realized it would make him fall asleep. That would be the thing that sealed her contempt, looking up to see him slack-jawed in a puddle of drool on this sofa that cost more than the entire contents of his apartment. It was so soft it was like sitting on butter. Possibly it wasn't even cow leather? Probably the whole thing was upholstered in llama skin, or something like that. 

It was another half an hour by his watch when the small buzzing noise on her desk made her glance at him. She turned on the killer smile of dazzling warmth. "Mr. Wayne will see you now," she said. 

"Great," he said, and then winced at the fake enthusiasm of his voice. She escorted him down the hall. She moved without making any noise. What was the possibility this place employed cylons as personal assistants? Moderate to high, he reckoned.

She clicked open one side of the double doors at the end of the hall.

The place was so vast he almost had trouble finding the desk, which was off by itself near the enormous windows. Bruce was sitting leafing through some papers, a mildly annoyed look on his face—wait, no, that was just his face. "Mr. Jordan to see you, sir," the woman announced, and Bruce looked up. The door clicked behind him, and the virago-cylon was gone. 

Now Bruce was frowning at him—scowling, actually. This was going great already. "What are you doing here?"

"I have an appointment," he said, because he didn't know what else to say. "I called and made it. With your. . . secretary, I guess. Three weeks ago. This was the soonest I could get in."

"Are you brain damaged? More than usual, I mean? Why on earth would you call my secretary if you wanted to see me, instead of just calling me?"

"I don't actually have your number."

"You're the Green Lantern responsible for this entire sector of space, but finding a cell phone number, that was too hard for you?"

Hal bit his lip on the sharp reply that wanted to emerge. This was going to go nowhere fast if he started sniping back at Bruce's every dig. "Well," he said. "Sometimes I like doing things the old-fashioned way. Face to face."

"We see each other on the Watchtower at least twice a week."

"Right. Well. This isn't. . . League business. It's, ah, personal."

There was on expression on Bruce's face that might have been intrigued, or might just have been another shade of irritated. Whichever it was, he gestured at one of the chairs opposite the desk. Hal sat in it, and his rehearsed speech died on his lips. He sat in silence while he tried to remember it. If he could just remember the first few words, that would carry him through the rest. Bruce was looking at him like he was going to repeat his question about brain damage. 

"I need to tell you a story," Hal said abruptly. "Because there's something I'm going to ask of you, and I think you'll understand better why if I can tell you the story behind it first. The only thing is, it's not a story I've told before, and I'm probably going to suck at telling it. This is not. . . something I've very good at."

He waited for the snarky reply to that one, but none was forthcoming. He glanced up to see Bruce sitting with steepled hands, waiting. He thought of those hands in the gauntlets, and realized that was how he sat at League meetings too. And then he remembered his speech. For a lurching, nauseating moment he considered getting up and leaving, apologizing for having made a terrible mistake, making something up. But then he remembered how he didn't have a choice, and of all the things Hal Jordan could reasonably be accused of, cowardice was not one he cared to own.

"My mother was a meth addict," he said. "Which I bet you probably knew."

"No," Bruce said. 

"Well, then your file on me is incomplete. I mean, when I say she was a meth addict I don't mean she was exclusive or anything like that. She was open to trying other things—alcohol, most often, but coke too, some acid when she could get it. The odd run of heroin. She was an illegal substances magnet. But meth was her true love. Cheap and exhilarating, not unlike her."

He shifted, waiting to see if Bruce would say something, but the room was silent. "When I was young, we moved around a lot," he continued. "Or anyway, that's what I told people when I was older. I told them we moved around a lot. It's a way of not having to say, 'we were frequently homeless' or 'I spent most of my teenage years couch-surfing.' You'd be surprised how hard it is to be a meth addict and hold a regular job. Or maybe not."

Bruce was still quiet, and somehow the quiet made the saying of this easier. He kept his eyes on his hands. "Anyway, we were what nowadays they call a 'food-insecure household.' There was never enough to eat, and most of the time, not enough money for anything else. So after a while, when I got older, I would work, when I could. Just doing whatever. Never enough to make a difference, but it was something, anyway." 

He glanced at Bruce's impassive face. "You're probably wondering why I didn't go to somebody, turn her into DFACS or something like that."

"No," was all Bruce said. 

"Well, most people would wonder that. I wonder that, looking back at it. All I can say is, when you grow up like that, everything starts to look normal. It was a lot of years before I even realized how far from normal it had all been. It was a lot of years before. . . " The thread of his story momentarily deserted him. He wished men still wore hats. He could have used a hat, to fidget with. 

"So anyway," he went on. "When I was fifteen, I did get a job. Most other jobs I had had to quit because I couldn't go to work and still get my schoolwork done, and I already had it in my head that that was my ticket out. I was actually pretty serious about school, and I didn't see any other way out, any way to not ending up like Amber that didn't involve being good at school."

"Amber was your mother," Bruce said.

"Yeah, I never called her mom or anything like that. She hated that. Said it made people look at her like she was old. So I always just called her Amber. If I forgot she would get mad. But my point is, my job."

"When you were fifteen."

"Yes. Amber had a boyfriend, Buck—sort of an on-again, off-again thing. Or more accurately, a 'now I'm out of prison, now I'm back in' kind of thing. He would live with us, off and on. Unsurprisingly he was about the role model of male adulthood you would expect from a larcenous meth-head. In the plus column, he knew how to make money, and he set me up with my first few jobs."

He tapped his thumb against his leg. "These jobs were not legal work," he said. "Buck's contacts were not members of the Rotary Club, is my point. But the pay was. . . excellent. I made serious money. I put food on the table. I even got Amber to agree to go to rehab, for a while there. I think that lasted ten days. But the point was, I had a chance at supporting us."

He paused, right where he hadn't meant to pause. When he had rehearsed it, it had seemed to go better if he moved quickly into this next part. A dramatic pause just made it worse. But now that he had paused, he couldn't figure out how to un-pause, or how to erase the effect. "It was hustling," he said. "I hustled the money. Buck set up the appointments with guys he knew. It was good money. I looked older than I was. And I quit after a while. After two years."

It was a silent room, for which he was grateful. "Buck took a cut of my pay," he said, "but a reasonable one. He was considerate, as those things go. The only thing he did insist on was filming, whenever I was. . . working. It is a bizarre but completely true sidebar of this story that Buck had had ambitions of going to film school, back in the day. He had even stolen his own equipment. He was always very concerned with the integrity of the camera angle, that sort of thing. So he recorded everything, and I let him, because why not, and I had no idea what happened to those recordings."

He swallowed. It sounded too loud in the still room. "Or I should say, I had no idea until three months ago what had happened to those recordings."

Bruce made a noise then—or not even a noise, just a long quiet exhale. "So the end of the story is this," Hal said.

"The end of the story is, you are being blackmailed," Bruce said.

"Yes."

"And I'm guessing that three months ago, Buck re-appeared in your life."

"No, actually," Hal said. "I haven't heard from him since I left home. Turns out he left for good not long after I left for the Academy. But he did leave behind some of his stuff with Amber, who got curious, a few months ago, and decided to go through some of his boxes. Leaving aside that she didn't save a single one of my school pictures, but apparently held onto this loser's shit for nineteen years."

"Your mother," Bruce said. 

"Yes. But here is where it gets interesting. She recognized me, like several years ago. She knew I was the Green Lantern. I'm guessing from that award ceremony thing in the Rose Garden, after Darkseid. Go figure, huh? And somehow she tracks me down, and she starts writing me. I ignored it at first. I haven't talked to her in years, and I had no interest in going down that road again. What the hell do I have to say to her anyway. But then a few months ago, she found Buck's things."

Bruce was back to steepling his fingers like he was wearing gauntlets. Hal steadied himself. "Look," he said. "I can buy the tapes back. But I've already cashed out whatever savings I had, and sold most everything I owned, and what she's asking I can't get. At least, not without a co-signer. I rent my apartment rather than own it, and on my own I don't have the kind of collateral necessary to get a loan for this amount. So what I'm wondering is—"

"What is she asking?"

"She's asking five hundred thousand." Hal let that settle into the room. There was no visible tell on Bruce's face. "I just need a co-signer," he said. "Every bank on the East Coast has already turned me down. But I figured if I had you to—"

"What were the savings you cashed out?"

"Oh. Well. Not that much. To you, anyway. But I had twenty-seven thousand, saved up. I make decent money as a test pilot, and I don't have many expenses."

"What did you sell?"

Hal hesitated. "My car. My computer, my TV. Nothing really impressive, but at first it was enough to hold her off. I mean, look, on its own it's not that valuable, right? Probably half of America has old sex tapes in their garage. But if she could attach the Green Lantern's name to it—if the Post decides to run the headline _Green Lantern Sex Tapes_ , which would sell nine million copies before I could even figure out how the hell to respond—I could either lie and say it's not me, and probably get caught, or confess and watch the League's name get dragged through the mud once again, and this time because of me, and that's not—that's just not an acceptable option." 

"Not nine million," Bruce said. "Batman sex tapes, those might sell nine million. Green Lantern isn't going to move that much copy."

"Okay. Thanks for turning the most painful episode of my life into yet another opportunity to belittle me. Are you going to help me or not?"

Bruce leaned back in his chair. Whatever was on his face was nothing Hal could read. It was interesting that it was not, after all, the cowl that made his face so impenetrable. "I'm not going to co-sign a loan," he said. 

"Right," Hal said. "Of course you're not. Because that would just be too easy. For God's sake, I'm not asking you to give me money, you tight-fisted son of a bitch, I'm asking you to help me secure a _loan_ , all right? You think I'm asking for a hand-out? Fuck you. Is it so hard to understand that someone might just need a little help to—"

He pushed up from his chair and paced the room, to calm himself, to try to backtrack. He hadn't meant to explode like that, but Bruce was sitting there like he hadn't even heard him. Like he was just thinking. "Go home," Bruce said.

Hal just stood there. He couldn't believe that this was the end; part of him had really believed that when point-blank asked, Bruce would help him. What the hell had been wrong with him, that he had thought that? "You think this was easy, coming here," Hal said. He tried to control the shake in his voice. "You think coming to you was my idea of a good time."

Bruce glanced at him. He still had that abstracted look on his face, like he was thinking about something else. "No," he said. "But you should go home."

Hal's look was as level as Bruce's. "Fuck you," Hal said. "From the bottom of my heart." He turned and walked out, letting the sleek door slam in its sleek hinges, striding across the sleek carpet to the secretary with her sleek, expensive smile. He paused at the desk for a minute on his way to the elevator.

"So, ah," he said. She smiled back. "I don't know Gotham that well, are there any restaurants you recommend around here?"

She nodded. "A great many, Mr. Jordan. Which cuisine in particular interests you?"

"Well," he said. "To be honest, it's company I'm more interested in, rather than any cuisine."

She continued to smile. "Would you—" he began, and stopped at her incandescent smile. "There's not a chance in hell, is there."

"No," she said sweetly.

"All right, that sounds about right for my day." He punched the button on the elevator, which opened for him immediately, and let the heavy doors slide shut on the ruin of his life.


	2. Chapter 2

It was two days before he saw Bruce Wayne again, and when he did, the man was sitting in his living room. 

He was coming home at the end of a long day at the airstrip—a day of failed flight after failed flight, because the universe had decided to suck balls in every direction, apparently—and had just closed and locked his apartment door behind him, when he turned around and saw Bruce goddamn Wayne sitting in his living room.

Just sitting there, legs crossed, like he was waiting for him. In his impeccable suit and that blank face. "Jesus Christ," Hal said. "You almost gave me a heart attack. You can't do that to people."

And then he saw the shoebox, sitting on the coffee table in front of Bruce. It was orange and shabby and frayed at the corners, and PriVAtE Do NoT TOUch!!! was scrawled across the top in black sharpie that was unmistakably Buck's handwriting, and for a gut-sucking moment he saw Buck standing there, as large and terrifying as he had been when Hal was eleven. But then he looked away, and it was only a shoebox, and Bruce Wayne whose eyes were watching him.

Hal came and sat down too, and put his head in his hands. For a long while he didn't say anything. The shoebox sat between them, on the coffee table. There was packing tape wrapping it, but he didn't need to see the tape to know that Bruce wouldn't have looked inside, wouldn't have looked at any of it. 

"How," Hal said, and cleared his throat. "How did you get this."

"It wasn't that hard, actually. She wasn't difficult to find."

"How much did you end up paying?"

Bruce crossed his legs the other direction. "Nothing, actually."

"Nothing?"

"She gave it to me. I tracked her down after our talk the other day, and explained the importance to the League—and to you—of this material being destroyed. She was willing to listen. She said it was never her intention to hurt you. I think the whole thing was a ploy, really, to get you to pay attention to her."

Hal laughed softly. "Well done."

"Like I said, it wasn't that hard. I didn't do—"

"I meant well done on your lying. It probably would have worked, except you forget, I've actually met Amber. She doesn't give anybody anything, and it sure as hell _is_ her intention to hurt me, for reasons I'm sure she made clear. But A plus for effort. How much did you have to pay her?"

Bruce's thumb was rubbing his jaw like he was assessing the quality of his shave. "The amount is unimportant. What's important is that she is out of your life, for good."

"Is she alive?"

"That was the way I left her, yes."

"Then she's not out of my life, trust me. How much did you have to pay?"

"Why are you fixated on that?"

"I'm not _fixated_ on it, I have a right to know. How much did you pay her?"

"I have no intention of—"

"How _MUCH_ did you _FUCKING_ pay, you _COCKSUCKING_ son of a _BITCH!"_ He kicked the coffee table, and yesterday's paper slid off, as well as the stack of flight reports he was supposed to have filed and organized by tomorrow. They slid over the floor in a white avalanche. Bruce just looked at him, because nothing anyone ever said or did got to that bastard. 

"Five," he said, finally, and Hal stared.

"Five thousand," he said. "I don't believe it. She let that go for five thousand dollars? What the _hell?"_

"Not five thousand."

"But you just said—" And then he stopped, because he got it, and his stomach fell through the floor. He got up then, because he had to move or do something so the thing eating his insides didn't consume him, and he found he was braced on the windowsill, gripping it so he didn't fall over. Not five thousand. Not five _thousand_. 

"You paid five million dollars for what was in that shoebox," he said faintly. Almost the words would not make it out his strangled throat.

"I did," Bruce said, and Hal shut his eyes.

"Wow," Hal said. "I made good money back in the day, but I have to be honest, no one ever paid that much for me before. I guess whores never really lose their touch, do they?"

"That isn't—"

"I'm sorry," Hal said. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Just—just forget it. Look, I know it's going to take me a long time, and I realize unless human lifespans increase by three hundred percent in the next few years I have no hope of paying this back before I die, but I have to make some sort of effort here. What I can do is, I can do maybe four-eighty a month. If you give me a little more time, I could—"

"Listen to me," Bruce said, and for the first time Hal heard something in his voice, something that sounded like anger. "There are no circumstances under which you are paying me any money. I know you think I did something here, but I didn't. For the last several years I've maintained a fund, for exactly this sort of circumstance—for the protection of the League, when threatened by any sort of danger. A threat to one of us is a threat to all of us, and I neutralized that threat. You don't owe me anything."

"Maintained a _fund_ ," Hal said. "Jesus, you really do think I'm that stupid, don't you. Look! Some magical unicorn money magically fell from the sky into this magical Swiss bank account here, so I guess it must be okay, I must not owe anyone anything! Through magic!"

He was back to pacing. The image he couldn't drive out of his head was that Bruce Wayne had put himself in a room with Amber, with Amber of all people. He had had a conversation with Amber, for his sake. Probably a long one. The thought made him want to tear at his hair. It made his insides writhe. 

"Hal." It occurred to him it was the first time Bruce had ever used his name, just his unadorned name like that. "Listen to me. You don't owe me anything. I realize how this sounds, but five million dollars is nothing to me. That's a boat. I would pay five million for a decent boat. In this case, I got a lot more than a boat. I got a lot more than what's in that box, too."

"What do you mean," Hal said. "What are you talking about."

"I'm talking about, I didn't just buy the contents of that box. I bought everything. I bought the rights to her story. Or rather, Wayne Enterprises did, in its capacity as a media conglomerate. The _Planet_ isn't the only paper I own. Once she understood the vastness of the market her story could reach, she was happy to deal with me. Couldn't have been more thrilled, in fact." 

Hal sat back down, numb and drained. "She thought you were going to publish it," he said. 

"Yes. That's why she dealt with me. She signed a contract. Exclusive rights to all hard copy, and more importantly, exclusive rights to all aspects of her story. So she can't, say, give an interview to the _Gazette_ or the _Post_ , she can't so much as burble something on YouTube about it without being in violation of her contract, and the minute she does that, my lawyers will devour her for breach, and she loses her money. And I think we can both agree that she is not one to lose sight of her own advantage."

Almost he wanted to laugh. He did sort of laugh, a whuff of astonished air. Part of him wished now he had seen it, Bruce putting the charm on Amber, Bruce persuading her to sign. Not that he would have had to persuade her; she would have been salivating to sign. "It's airtight," Bruce said. Maybe he had thought Hal was laughing at the idea of Amber being bound by a contract. "My lawyers saw to that. I'm not a multi-billionaire because I hire incompetent lawyers."

"Aren't you a multi-billionaire because your parents were?"

"Yes, it's a great country. You should know, there's a codicil to her contract, restricting contact with you. Eliminating it, in fact. She is, for all intents and purposes, out of your life. She has enough money to keep her from bothering you again, and she has signed a legally binding agreement to stay clear of you. You won't be seeing her again."

He just sat there, because he didn't know how to respond. "Why did you do this," was all he could think to say. 

"I've told you, she came at the League. I can't allow that."

Hal shook his head. "It's not that simple. If I hadn't been such a dumb-ass kid—"

"It occurs to me you were many things, when you were younger, but dumb was never among them. Look Jordan, I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone they need to talk about their feelings—and please don't construe this as an invitation to talk about them with me—but you should probably consider talking to Dinah. I have found her to be, at various points. . . useful."

"So that's the end of the story. Amber goes back home with five million dollars, which she blows in six months on much fancier drugs than meth, and life goes on."

"Well. She goes back home with almost five million. I explained that it was customary for a media contract like this to entail signing fees of fifty thousand. So that's your savings restored, and some left over to replace your things and buy a decent car. She goes home with four million, nine hundred and fifty thousand."

"Okay," Hal said. "You realize that is just you handing me money, right? Or are we still pretending things about the magical unicorn trust fund of awesome specialness?"

"I don't know if you've noticed," Bruce said, "but I have a thing for justice. Today, this is what justice looks like. I would prefer the justice where this woman is locked in a jail cell for the rest of her life, but for now, justice looks like you getting your life back, far away from her and anyone associated with her."

Hal was back to just looking at the shoebox. He had no idea what to say. "I have no idea what to say," he said. "Possibly. . . possibly I should not have yelled at you. Or cursed at you. Or called you a cocksucker. All of which makes me feel pretty bad right now, I admit."

"Money well spent, then. Also, I should point out that none of the names you called me were half as filthy as what you called yourself."

Hal tightened his jaw and looked at the floor. Bruce was getting up to leave. "My secretary will be in touch," he said. "Which should not be understood as another opportunity to hit on her. She's gay, by the way, not that it affects your chances one way or the other."

"Thanks," Hal said. "And while I'm on the subject of thanks, I need to say what I haven't said yet, which is—"

"Don't," Bruce said abruptly, and that flash of something like anger sharpened his features. "Don't do what you're about to do. Don't thank me."

"Right, because I don't owe you anything, I got it. It was all the magical unicorns."

"You don't, in fact. This is what friends do."

"All right," Hal said. "Okay. I guess I didn't realize that's what we were."

"I know," Bruce said. He was glancing around the apartment like he was looking for something. At the kitchen counter he tore off a corner of the newspaper. He scribbled something on it with a stray pencil he picked up from the table. "Here," he said, handing it to Hal. "In case you ever have need of those unicorns again." 

And he headed out the door, clicking it shut behind him, while Hal was still looking at the torn bit of paper, with a phone number written on it in a close careful hand.


	3. Chapter 3

And that was that; they didn't talk about it again.

They carried on as before, and he saw Bruce—well, Batman—on the Watchtower and on missions. There was no acknowledgement that anything had happened between them out of the ordinary. They worked together just fine, like before. He was still on the receiving end of more than his fair share of Bat-glares, but it bothered him about as much as it had before — which was to say, not at all. 

But it was curious, was all.

Curious that Bruce had thought of them as friends, for one thing. As far as he had ever seen, the man could barely stand his physical presence. Curious that Bruce had gone to that kind of trouble for him. Bruce had put himself in a room with someone he had to have found deeply distasteful, and had had to pretend to like her, even, in order to get what he wanted. It was a lot of unBatman-like behavior, from first to last. So it was curious. 

Curious enough that it got him thinking. And when Hal started thinking, he tended not to stop until he reached a conclusion. And that conclusion was even more curious.

"So," he said to Clark one day, sliding in next to him after a League meeting. "You and Bats, you're close, right?"

Clark looked up in obvious alarm. He set down the pad he was scrolling through. "Ahh. . ." he said. 

"I mean in the friendship kind of way. I wasn't asking about anything else. Should I ask about anything else? Because feel free to share, if that's on the table too."

Clark glanced at the door like maybe someone was going to come rescue him. His alarm had clearly deepened. "Ahh. . ." he said again.

"Never mind, you don't have to answer that. My point is that you two are close, and if anybody knows Bats, it's going to be Supes, am I right?"

"Hal. What on earth are you talking about?"

"Friendship. On balance, it's a little strange, right? That the two of you would be close? You're pretty different, is my only point."

"As are you and Barry," Clark remarked. 

"True. Fact is, there isn't much about Barry I don't know. I'm betting it's the same for you and Bats."

"Hal, what are you—"

"Is he completely straight? Like one hundred percent? Bruce, I mean."

Clark was staring at him. "How is Bruce's personal life any of your business?"

"It's not. That's why I don't know the answer. But you do. Is there any chance that he occasionally punts for the opposite team?"

"You're asking me if I know Bruce's sexual identity."

"I am. That is what I'm asking."

"All right. The answer is yes, I do." Clark just looked at him. "But there is no way on earth—no way on any other planet, solar system, or galaxy, for that matter—that I am sharing that with you. No way, no how, never."

"I'm not asking for nefarious purposes, I promise."

"I don't care what your purposes are." He turned back to his tablet, and reached for his coffee. 

"Okay," Hal said. "So you're sending me in there blind. That's something you're comfortable with."

"Yep."

"Fine," Hal said. He got up and headed to the door, before he stopped. "Hey. You're not going to mention this conversation to Bruce, are you?"

"I don't know," Clark said, sipping his coffee. "What's it worth to you?"

"You know, you're not as nice a person as people think you are."

"Nope," he said. Hal had his hand on the doorpad, but Clark stopped him this time. 

"Hal."

"Yeah?"

"Hurt him, and I will kill you." 

Hal narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if this was Clark's idea of a joke, or if he was completely serious. But Clark had gone back to his coffee, and his reading, and the door was already whooshing shut behind him.

* * *

But he didn't do anything about it, was the thing. He just thought about it for a while, weighing the possibilities. And then one day, when his 'what the hell' factor was particularly high, he called the number that was now in his contacts.

"Wayne," said the voice on the other end. 

"How do you know it's not someone looking for Batman? Do you keep a separate cell phone for Batman?"

There was a long sigh. "Jordan," he said. "What a pleasant surprise."

"I know, right? If I said I don't happen to need another couple million dollars, would you be happier to hear from me?"

"Not really. What do you want?"

"I can't just be calling to make conversation?"

"Unlikely."

"I can see how you'd think it unlikely people would volunteer for conversation with you."

"No, I said unlikely because making conversation requires wit and courtesy. You see why I think it's improbable that's what you're doing." 

"Oh my God," Hal said, with a grin. "You are. That's what's going on here. You're _flirting_ with me."

He heard the gust of Bruce's sigh. "Or, you're a narcissist who thinks of himself as the center of the universe."

" _Or_ , both are true at the same time. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't actually trying to kill you, and just because you're a narcissist doesn't mean people aren't actually flirting with you."

There was a pause. "The headache I started this day with is becoming more intense. Can we arrive at the point of your call?"

"Right. Okay, here it is. Is there any chance you would let me buy you dinner?"

The pause this time was so long Hal was worried he had actually hung up, or just tipped the phone into a nearby trashcan and walked away. "Where," was all he eventually said.

"Where? Are you asking because in your head you've already said yes, and we're now moving on to logistics, or are you asking because you won't say yes until you know where?"

"The latter. I'm not eating at some Olive Garden, just to satisfy your misplaced sense of obligation."

"Misplaced sense of. . . hold it right there, you son of a goddamn—" He rubbed at his temple. Now he was the one with a headache. "I hadn't actually thought of a place yet, because I didn't think you'd say yes, if you want to know."

"So this is more of a half-baked idea you're floating, rather than a genuine invitation."

"Yes. I mean, no. It's—"

"It's a miracle this entire sector of space has not imploded into the center of the galaxy, with you on guard. Call me when you've got an invitation." And then the line really did go dead. 

"Oh my God," Hal said, staring at the phone. "You cosmic, unbelievable douchebag. Who the hell do you think you—" 

And then he stopped, replaying the conversation. Somewhere in there, Bruce had actually said yes to dinner. With him. His day was either looking up, or he had just done the stupidest thing he had ever done in his life. 

Or, both were true at the same time.


	4. Chapter 4

Reservations at Chez Manissse were not hard to come by. The place wasn't hip or fashionable—or rather, it was the sort of place that had been hip and fashionable twenty-five years ago, but had aged gracefully along with its clientele. It was a small, intimate place, the sort of restaurant where paparazzi were unlikely to lurk and where the food was as understated as the ambience. Not bank-breakingly expensive, either—it would have been a mistake to try to impress Bruce Wayne, not to mention pointless. 

He arrived twenty-five minutes early, just to make sure the table was right. He had asked for one in the corner, away from people, somewhere Bruce could relax. He dithered a bit about the wine—should he choose something before Bruce arrived? Or was that a douchey maneuver? It wasn't like his knowledge of wines could match Bruce's anyway. He was sure to get it wrong.

He switched chairs twice, unable to decide which sightline Bruce would prefer. The one where he could see the room, probably. But then he would be too busy observing everybody else to pay sufficient attention to Hal, and Hal would spend the evening competing for eye contact with the suspicious-looking busboy or the sexy potential jewel thief at the next table.

He ate breadsticks while he waited, and got crumbs on their nice clean tablecloth. He tried to brush them off and only ground them in more. Should he ask for a new tablecloth? No, then the wait staff would hate him, and he needed them on his side. They were already getting a bit judge-y with the breadsticks.

They were supposed to meet at 8, and it was 8:04. Bruce was always punctual. Something had happened. Some emergency somewhere, some Arkham break-out, some supervillain unleashing deadly toxins into the city's swimming pools. Or, nothing had happened. Nothing had happened, and Bruce was not showing because it was his way of teaching Hal a lesson, and the hell of it was, that seemed entirely plausible. Woefully plausible. The sort of plausible that was skating toward 'likely' with every passing minute, and Hal had just resigned himself to being stood up when he caught sight of the dark head at the door. Or not the head, really—more the very distinctive pattern of motion. Bruce moved like normal people did not move, with minimal displacement of air, with perfect smooth economy of muscle and tendon. A predatory glide, he would have said, but then he realized he had just spent a solid forty seconds thinking about the way Bruce walked across a room and yeah, what he had thought was just his idle curiosity in a fascinating sexual possibility was. . . maybe something a bit more. 

"Did you choose a wine?" was all Bruce said, when the waiter showed him to the table. Hal rose, awkwardly, because he wasn't sure of the etiquette, and then tried to stop himself in the middle of the rise, because he remembered that was what you did for women, and maybe Bruce would be offended. Stopping only made it worse. 

"I. . . no. You look. . . dressed." 

"Are you having a stroke?"

"No, I. . . I got stuck." _You look beautiful_ , had been on the tip of his tongue to say, because it was true. He had been going to say it more as an observation of astonishment than a compliment. Houndstooth jacket, soft gray turtleneck, black pinstripe pants—the sort of outfit you threw together just by walking into a closet like Wayne's. His own button-down and khakis looked ridiculous by comparison, like some college frat boy. Christ. 

"Well, I almost wasn't," Bruce said. "Dressed, that is. The sprinkler system went off on the second floor of the house, in all rooms—including my closet."

"Supervillains?"

"If by supervillains you mean an eleven-year-old with an inability to understand why he should not practice combat maneuvers with a flaming sword, then yes, that is exactly what happened."

He could see now the tightness around Bruce's mouth, and wondered if it was residual irritation at Robin. "Your house in one piece?"

"Barely. Nothing caught fire, thank goodness, but most of my possessions are drenched. Luckily I still had some clean things that were in the laundry room, from a trip last week. Alfred is taking care of the rest."

"Oh. Well, listen, if you need to re-schedule. . . it sounds like maybe you need to be home tonight."

"Why, my home is wet. What's good here?" He was examining the menu with a critical eye.

"No idea, never been. Someone stuck the take-out menu on my windshield, thought I'd give it a try."

"Mm. Well, I've heard good things, though I've never been. I'll need to ask about the confit though."

"Does that sort of thing happen a lot?"

Bruce flipped to the back page of the menu. "What sort of thing?"

"Your kid trying to burn down your house?"

"Yes, in fact. It's not as though re-scheduling would make my life any easier. Damian is. . . not like other children. He was raised to be an assassin, trained for that since birth. Learning to be just a boy is a challenge, after that."

"Well, except he's not, is he. Just a boy. I mean, spending time with you and your night job, that's not exactly your average boy-type activity."

"If I tried to keep him home and away from my night job, as you call it, things would be worse. I tried benching him once, and it was. . . a disaster that almost got us both killed, in the end." Bruce sounded tired, and for a moment Hal could see it: not the Bruce he had imagined, idly running his finger over cashmere jackets in his dressing room, but Bruce yelling at his kid and trying desperately to find something dry to wear and still make it out the door in time, and the slammed doors and shouted curses, and maybe Bruce getting into his car running late and swearing a blue streak. 

"Well, you're here now," Hal said lightly, and Bruce looked up. 

"Yes I am. Why don't you pick something for both of us."

"Me? I wouldn't know what the hell you want. Why do I have to pick?"

"Because I wear contact lenses, most of the time. Lenses that are currently swirling down my bathroom drain in a flood, and to be honest I can't see a thing. Just pick something."

"Wait, how did you drive over here?"

"Driving is fine, I'm farsighted. Are you going to pick something? Would it narrow your choices if I told you nothing on here is French for hot wings?"

"What about in the. . . ohhhh, right, it has _lenses_. Gotcha. So it's things close up you can't see. You wear glasses?"

"Sometimes."

"And let me guess, those are currently lost as well?"

"Ah, no. I know exactly where they are. They have been disassembled and the lenses removed to serve as a laser refracting device for the flamethrower."

Hal couldn't help the laugh. "I'm sensing a theme."

"Well, that would be correct." And Bruce's fingers rubbed his forehead, briefly. "I did not discover their disassemblage until about 7:30 this evening, however. At which point I engaged in strategic retreat—"

"You gave up."

"To someone untrained in combat, it might look like that, I admit."

Hal's laugh settled into a grin. "God help you, you're raising a baby you. He's you, surely you realize that."

"It has been suggested to me." And the irritated lines of Bruce's face relaxed, fractionally. "And if I don't discipline him as much as I should when he pulls something like this evening, it's because part of me is just grateful he's channeling his violence onto objects, and not people. It could have been worse. It has been worse."

He glanced up, and Hal met his eyes—shockingly clear and gray next to the gray turtleneck—and something clenched in his stomach and turned over and he thought, _uh oh_. He had to remind himself this was really just an experiment. He had poked the bear, as Flash used to call it when he baited Batman, just to see if the bear would respond. He had not thought beyond that, and it was occurring to him he really, really should have. 

He had a wild impulse to sneak into the bathroom and call Barry. _Bar, what do I do, I think I've got a crush on Batman that I totally forgot about when I asked him to dinner_. Barry would laugh himself sick. Actually no, he wouldn't. He would say _what the hell are you talking about, a crush on who?_ because Hal had never actually managed to say to his best friend, _hey you know what, I'm not really what you would consider straight, strictly speaking_. That might be another thing he had forgotten about. He had never come out to Barry, and wasn't that sad. Barry would be fucking furious with him. 

Bruce was watching him curiously. "You all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, fine. Okay, let's see here," he said to the waiter, who was decorously hovering while not hovering, the cut of his eyes taking in, Hal imagined, the provenance of his jacket. 

"Avez-vous décidé, monsieur?"

"Je pense que oui. Recommandez-vous le potage crécy, ou les crêpes d'asperge?" 

"Ah, le potage, certainement monsieur. Mais avec le coulis de persil, si vous me demanderiez."

"Bien, merci, alors. . . deux potages crécy, avec coulis, et deux navarins d'agneau et. . . peut-être ce vin italien, le Montepulciano? Que pensez-vous?"

The waiter had unbent quite a bit at Hal's competent French, and had a small smile for him now. "Ah non, monsieur, avec l'agneau? Le Montepulciano, ce n'est pas mauvais, mais c'est un vin un petit peu. . .prosaïque? A mon avis, le meilleur vin pour cet agneau, c'est le pinot noir, la Romanée Saint-Vivant. Ça vous plait, monsieur?"

The pinot was about three times more expensive than the Montepulciano, but he nodded. "Bien. Si vous le recommandez. Et merci."

"De rien, monsieur," the waiter said with a last smile, and then he bustled off with their menus, and Hal met the quirk of Bruce's eyebrow across the table. 

"Not in the way, am I?"

"Nah, we're cool, I can get his number with the check."

"I bet you could at that. That something you make a habit of?"

"What, speaking French? I don't, really. The Air Force ran this tactical program with NATO allies for a few years—an officer exchange program, really. I was stationed at Chambley-Brussières for eighteen months, and language is just something I pick up. I probably couldn't make it to page three of a grammar book, but I do all right conversationally, with just about anything I'm immersed in for long enough."

"Interesting," Bruce said. "Though I meant picking up waiters."

"No you didn't. You meant picking up men."

"Did I?" Bruce was taking a sip of his water and casing the room with those cool, canny eyes. 

"It would probably surprise you if I said I don't. Make a habit of it, that is."

"It probably wouldn't."

Hal narrowed his eyes at that. "I have no idea how to take that. And as long as we're being honest, I sure as hell have no idea how to take you."

"I'm a lot simpler than you imagine."

Hal sat back and watched the waiter uncork the Romanée Saint-Vivant, and tried to process this particular Bruce Wayne sitting across from him—not quite Batman, but certainly not the laconic grim-featured Bruce he thought he had known, either. "I thought maybe you were gonna make a sex joke of that," he said. "About how to take you. Like, forty percent of me thought you might."

"I did, in my head."

Hal laughed. "Well now I'm gonna spend the rest of the night wondering what it was. You might as well tell me now."

Bruce's small smile was remote and maybe a little sad. He was beginning to figure out that reading Bruce Wayne was not unlike language immersion in a foreign country, like being dropped off in Kyrgyzstan and expected to make your way to the nearest McDonalds. You started to recognize the same twitch of lip you had seen before, and to decipher meanings you couldn't have guessed. "Listen," Bruce said. "I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful for the dinner. This is very nice. But it's not necessary, is my point."

"Right," Hal said. "Misplaced sense of obligation, I remember. So, seriously, you think that someone gives me five million dollars, and my idea is, I take him to dinner and then we're square?"

"It's a very nice dinner."

"How would you know, you haven't even tasted it yet."

"My point is—"

"Yeah, I take your point," Hal said. "And you're right to be concerned, you really are. Why just the other day, I'm in line at the Shop 'n Save, and this guy in front of me with a cartful of groceries lets me go ahead of him because I only have five items, and bam, I'm down on the linoleum sucking cock like a Hoover before I even know what I'm doing. And don't even get me started about the week before that, when the old lady at the gas station gave me too much change. I'm telling you, I can barely see a twenty without my knees hitting the floor, so obviously with your bank account I'm going to be unable to control myself. I'm amazed I haven't bitten your zipper off already."

Bruce dropped his eyes. His face was white, his lips a thin line. The soup arrived, and they were served in silence. Hal's grip on his spoon was murderous, and he could feel the blood—the rage—pounding in his chest, his face. Bruce folded his napkin.

"Forgive me," he said. "Though you would be right not to. Let me explain. I fuck things up. That is what I do for a living. Not things. People. People, is what I am incapable of navigating, so the end of this evening before the main course even arrived was predictable. I am. . . sorry, for what it's worth."

He laid his napkin on the table, carefully, and rose. It seemed like the moment for Hal to say something, but nothing was occurring to him. Instead he seized Bruce's wrist, just as he was turning to go. "Stop," he said.

"Let go of my wrist." Bruce's jaw was clenched so tight the words had difficulty emerging.

"Just—please. Just sit down. Can you—can you just sit down? Can you just sit down and have dinner with me?"

"Why would you want that?"

"Because I do, all right? Can we just have dinner?"

Warily, Bruce sat. They were quiet for a minute, and Hal rubbed at his forehead. "Look," he tried. "You didn't fuck anything up. You didn't fuck up. I did, all right? Can we just forget I lost it like that, and eat some lamb stew and drink ridiculously expensive wine and—I don't really know, whatever the hell it is people do when they have dinner together."

"What I implied was unforgivable."

"Bruce. Did it ever occur to you that maybe you fuck things up with people because when they offer you a second chance, you don't know how to take it?"

"All the time."

"Then. . . don't _do_ that shit. Look, just have dinner with me, because if you leave now everyone in the whole restaurant will know that I just got ditched, and that will just be sad, and I will have to sit here and eat like it's not bothering me, and that's even sadder. So let's just have dinner, all right?"

"I don't need pity."

"I. . ." Hal wanted to smack his forehead. "You _what?_ How did you even get to there from here? What happens in your head? Pity? What the hell does pity have to do with— _ohhhh_ ," he said. "I get it. Being nice to Bruce means pitying Bruce. Okay. Jesus, you ought to come with a road map."

"That has also been suggested."

Hal sighed. "You're kind of a work-out."

"I. . . apologize."

Hal fiddled with his spoon, tapping it on the padded tablecloth. The rich orange of their soup stared back at them, untouched. The low murmur of other diners was a pleasing background noise, with just an occasional laugh. "It took me a while," he said. "To get that you were flirting. Before, I mean. I thought you just hated my guts. You flirt like a fourth-grade boy, you know that."

"Yes," Bruce said. "I do many things like a fourth-grade boy."

It occurred to Hal why that was, but he offered no comment. He was going to turn over a new leaf about saying the first thing that popped into his brain. Doing that around Bruce was like lighting your cigarette next to a gasoline tank. "All right," Hal said. "Thank you for staying."

"Well. You did put on an ironed shirt. It would be a shame to waste it."

"Ah, see," Hal said with a grin, "more of that fourth-grade flirting technique, I like it. Your average person might think, well, he's just making fun of the fact that you don't know how to dress like an adult, but me, I can read that for the declaration of passion it is."

"You do remember our earlier conversation about narcissism, right?"

"Stop, you big sap. We're in public and everything. What will people say?"

"You're insufferable."

Hal threw back his head and laughed. "Too late. Anything you say, I'm just going to read it as the opposite. I've found the key to Bruce Wayne."

The sardonic twist of Bruce's mouth was his only tell. "Shut up, you idiot, and eat your dinner."

"Oh man, hours of fun. How are you still single, is what I'd like to know."

They finished their soup in easy silence, and no one seemed to have noticed the brief scene that had played out at their table. Maybe drama like that happened at restaurants like Chez Manisse all the time, and the staff was accustomed to it. Probably they were trained to act like everything was normal, all the time. So Hal took a page out of their book, and decided to act like it was all fine. He even made an effort to keep conversation going this time. They talked about everything and nothing. He asked more questions about Damian, and Bruce (surprisingly) answered them, and then Hal thought he would console Bruce for his hellion of a son by a few rounds of Stupidest Thing I Ever Did As A Kid, which only made Bruce shake his head.

"Oh come on," Hal said. "Like you never got up to anything similar as a kid. I bet Alfred could tell some tales."

"But he wouldn't, because he works for me."

"Yeah, something tells me you work for him."

"Not untrue. If by work for, you mean that when he yells, I obey."

Hal smiled. "I'd pay good money to see that. I didn't know anything scared the B—you," he quickly corrected himself. They were in a quiet corner of a quiet restaurant, and no one was listening, but he was still shocked at himself that he had almost slipped like that. 

"Plenty scares me," Bruce said, ignoring the mistake. "I have children."

"Besides burning your house down, I mean."

"That wasn't what I meant," he said. "If you think a burning house is what you worry about, then you really don't have children of your own."

"I really don't, thank God. I'm pretty sure I'd shoot myself in the face first. Kids depress the hell out of me."

"They depress you?" Bruce frowned.

"Tiny prisoners, all of them. Completely in some grown-up's power, nothing they can do about it, and ninety-nine percent of them are miserable."

"Projecting your own life experience onto the universe is textbook narcissism, you realize that."

"Okay. So if you're so convinced I'm a narcissist, why are you having dinner with me?"

"Narcissists make good conversationalists."

Hal narrowed his eyes. "If I say you're flirting, I'm a narcissist. If I say you're telling the truth, then I have to admit I'm a narcissist. Curse you and your impenetrable logic." 

It was bizarre, that whole evening. When he looked back on it later, it always seemed carved out of space and time, a golden magical thing set apart, sharing borders with the rest of his life but not remotely like his life normally went. And about halfway through the navarins d'agneau, as the wine continued to flow, as he learned what Bruce's voice sounded like when it laughed in that low rueful way, he began to think, _Okay then. All right. This is a thing that could be_. Which should of course have been his first sign that it was not a thing for him, that it was not something he could have, but when would he ever learn. He needed to have his whole life history written up on typed double-sided sheets of paper and smacked in front of him, with _this is why we can't have nice things_ stamped across it, because obviously that was the only way he would be able to remember. 

But for most of that night, he did not remember. He did not remember when they sat talking over the empty table, long after it had been cleared and long after most of the other patrons had left. They were leaning closer, elbows on the table now, and Hal would not break whatever spell Bruce was under, whether it was the circle of candleglow or something else, that made talking like this possible. "Tell you what," Bruce finally said. "I know a little café not too far from here that stays open till all hours. Their coffee and dessert is the best in the city. Why don't we give our waiter a break and head over there?"

And Hal was smiling and agreeing, and after the check—and a tip so generous it made his molars ache to sign the tab while continuing to smile, but he did it—they walked outside, into the dark summer warmth of the city at night. "It's across the bridge, so we should drive," Bruce said. "My car's in the next block, unless you wanted to take yours?"

"Nah, yours is fine. I'm sure it's much better than mine anyway, particularly since I haven't bought one yet."

Bruce sighed heavily. "For God's sake."

"I know, I know—it's just, look, I was gonna go looking, I really was, but the truth is I've been off-world for most of the past three weeks, and just got back day before yesterday, and I had larger concerns than leafing through the latest edition of Consumer Reports, you know?"

"Larger concerns like what?" Bruce was saying with a frown.

"Space cop stuff. You really want to know?"

"I do."

So Hal told him, all about the Ventrallians and their latest push to colonize non-technologically advanced worlds by coercing them into treaties whose complexities they knew would confuse them, and how the Lanterns had been attempting to negotiate with the Ventrallians to back the fuck down and knock that shit off, when a militarist faction of Ventrallian generals had decided just for shits and giggles to open fire on a contingent of Lanterns, conveniently forgetting that Green Lanterns were the most diplomatic peace-loving bastards in the multiverse, but open fire on them and burning green wrath was going to fuck your shit up seventeen ways to Sunday, and—

"Sorry," Hal said, realizing he had been talking a blue streak for the last five minutes, while they walked. "It's just I've been a little in the middle of all this, and sometimes it's hard to get my head elsewhere."

"I can't relate to that at all," Bruce said, clicking his keys at his car, a sleek silver-gray Lamborghini Aventador parked at the curb.

"Jesus Christ," Hal said. "You parked that thing on the _street?"_

"It has one or two security features, you might be unsurprised to learn."

"Unless it's been retrofitted with a laser cannon behind the headlights, I don't see—"

"Well hey there," said the soft voice from the shadowed indent of alley behind them, and Hal went very still. There was a step, equally soft, just a scuff of shoe on pavement, moving closer.

"I been following you two for a while," the man said, "but looks like you had other things to talk about. Didn't want to interrupt."

Bruce had started to walk to the driver's side of the car, but had stopped at the first sound of the voice. Hal could track his careful re-alignment of movement as he put himself in the edge of Hal's sightline: a combat instinct. "You are the world's unluckiest criminal," Bruce said, "if you were targeting us for a mugging." 

"Oh, that wasn't what I was doing. Was it, Hal?"

Hal clenched the hand where the ring rested on his third finger, rubbing the smooth heavy metal against his thumb. He said nothing as the man advanced, the man who only had eyes for him—though a glance for the car behind them, it was true. "Nice ride," he said. "A got-damn Lambo. Well Jesus Christ, Hal boy, business must be brisk, am I right?"

"Get in the car," Hal said to Bruce, not turning his head. "I'll be right with you."

"I don't think I will," Bruce said, stepping onto the sidewalk, and the man just grinned wider. 

"Yeah, pretty boy. He'll be right with you. He's not gonna leave you hanging, are you? That's not what Hal does."

Nineteen years since he had laid eyes on him, and what was amazing was how little had changed, even while everything had changed. The brown hair had gone silver at the temples, but it was still thick. The face had weathered, and there was the scruff of beard starting, but he was as big as ever, as muscle-dense as he had always been. But even so, no match for Hal. "I told you once," Hal said steadily, "that if I saw you again I would kill you. What did I do to make you doubt me?"

The grin got wider at that one, and Hal struck. It was simple—two clean motions and he was down on the pavement, and a third one planted Hal's foot in his groaning abdomen. From the corner of his eye he registered Bruce's absolute stillness. 

"Hal," he said quietly.

Hal ground the foot in harder. "Like the man said, not your lucky night." 

"Hal," Bruce said again.

"Get in the car," Hal said. "Get out of here. I have some business to take care of."

"I think I should stay."

"And I said, _get in the car_." He turned his head and looked Bruce straight in the eye. He never knew what Bruce read there, or what made him decide to obey, but obey he did. He clicked open the Lamborghini and got in without a backward glance, and he had driven away from the curb before Hal lifted his foot. 

"Get up," he said.


	5. Chapter 5

It was two in the morning before he made it back to his place, and when he was inside the door of his apartment he shut it and leaned his head against it. There was nothing left to feel, and even the rage in him felt old, spent. As empty as everything else inside him. Nevertheless he balled his fist and hit the door with it, as hard as he could—more as a way of displacing the ache than anything else. And then he hit it again. It was just the futility of it all. He closed his eyes and kept his head resting on the door. The pain in his knuckles was refreshing. 

"That was Buck," said the voice behind him, but Hal had whirled and raised his ring at the first sound, all his senses on hyper-alert, and he had thrown up a green shield before Bruce could so much as raise his hands in surrender. Or maybe it was meant to be a calming gesture. Hal lowered his ring.

"Jesus Christ," he breathed. "Do I need to get you a key or something? Is this going to be a habit?"

"I don't need a key, obviously," Bruce pointed out. 

"Because you can't just _do_ that to people. In this apartment, it's going to get you hurt."

"That was Buck," Bruce said again.

"Yeah, excellent detective work there. That was Buck." He tossed his keys on the table. "Was there something you wanted?"

"To make sure you were all right."

Hal laughed, bitterly. "I'm great. Why wouldn't I be?"

"It occurred to me you might—"

"What the hell did you think would happen, Bruce?" Bruce was standing there in his kitchen, hands in his pockets, face impassive as ever. "Seriously, what the hell did you think would happen? You handed five million dollars to Amber Jordan, and you thought, what, problem over? You honestly thought she would keep her mouth shut?"

Bruce was still saying nothing, and Hal leaned against the door again. "Let me tell you what," he said wearily. "You know rich people, and you know criminals. Hell, maybe you even know how everyday, ordinary people work. But I'll tell you what you don't know anything about, and that's trash. You have no idea how trash works. Trash will just keep coming after you, even if it's in their best interest not to. Trash doesn't care about anyone's best interests, even their own, because trash has never even had a best interest to worry about in the first place. You know how I know about trash? Because trash is where I'm from. These are my people. I know about trash because _I'm_ trash. Now get the fuck out of my apartment, and let me deal with this mess in my own way. We're done with your way."

"Does he want money?"

Hal laughed. "Why, what are you going to do? Maybe reach into your magical unicorn fund, toss some more millions at him? Let me tell you what you're doing, when you do that, because you're not solving a problem, you're _creating_ one. You're chumming the waters. That's raw bloody meat you're throwing into a goddamn shark-filled ocean, and the sharks, they can smell it for hundreds, _thousands_ of miles. You throw some money at Buck, and what do you think is going to happen next? He won't be able to resist running his mouth to one of his old buddies, one of the fuckheads in those videos, and it won't be long before every one of them shows up here. Maybe not right away. Maybe it takes several months, or even years. But eventually, they'll get word that there's blood in the water. Eventually, they'll be here. Because they're trash, and that's what trash does."

He kicked out a chair at the kitchen table, thinking he might sit, but he just leaned his hands on the table, bracing himself. He was suddenly exhausted, and had no more desire to talk. "Can you please go," he said. 

"What happened," Bruce said. 

"It is _my_ house," Hal said. "I'm still the one who pays the rent. You don't own my house, just because you think you bought me. I get to say when you leave."

"I don't think that I own anything, least of all you. But you need to—"

" _What?_ " Hal shouted, and this time when he kicked the chair, it hit the floor. "Calm down? Is that what I need to do? What the hell is the end of that sentence, Bruce? Go on, say it, you arrogant son of a bitch. What do I need to do?"

Bruce's eyes glinted fire, and Hal wondered if he had finally made him mad. "You're not being rational," Bruce said. "Assaulting Buck, as satisfying as I'm sure it was, was a stupid move. Threatening his life was even stupider."

"I did not _threaten_ his life, I repeated what I had told him earlier, which was—"

"A threat. And if you would take sixty seconds to think rationally—"

"For fuck's sake, can you stop pretending there is some solution here that only you are wise enough to see? Because maybe if you hadn't decided that before, maybe if you had let me deal with Amber the way I knew to deal with her instead of decided that the goddamn Batman was going to swoop in and solve everybody's problems for them, I wouldn't be in this situation, did you ever think of that one?"

"The way you knew to deal with her? What way would that be, selling your furniture off stick by stick until she finally gave up and destroyed your life when she got bored?"

"It was my life to destroy!"

"You came to me for help, what did you expect me to do?"

"If you had stopped to _ask—"_

"I'm not in the habit of asking less competent people for permission to do my job!" 

Hal's right hook landed in his jaw clean and true, and he didn't need the ring to do it. Of course, he had always known that he could land a punch on Batman, but that was like parachuting from a plane—the trick was to do it a second time. Sure enough, the vise grip that cracked his fist and twisted his arm had him gasping. He writhed free with a blow of his elbow, but then Bruce had both his arms pinned to the table. "Motherfucker," he panted.

"You raise your hand to me, you better bring your A game," Bruce ground out, and Hal laughed and lunged forward, catching Bruce's mouth in his. He had time to feel the small rasp of stubble, and there it was, the moment of surprise, of loosening in all Bruce's limbs. _Got you now, motherfucker_. Hal waited for the small hesitant response, for the mouth that opened to his, before he grinned and broke free, aiming his second blow for Bruce's middle—blocked again, because damn the man was fast, but he was still on the defensive. 

Now Bruce was backing up, wiping at his mouth. "Fuck you," he said.

"Made you swear," Hal whispered. Those iceberg eyes squinted at him, and that was the last thing he saw before a freight train landed on his jaw, and it was all he could do to keep his feet. He slid under the next punch, though, and for a half-second considered using his ring—but he had begun this fight, and he was damned if he would need help to end it. 

"I won't fight you," Bruce said.

"Conveniently said _after_ you punch the hell out of me," Hal said, and now he was the one wiping at his mouth. 

"You're angry at yourself, not me."

"Hell yes I'm angry at myself, but newsflash, I'm also pretty mad at you, in case you hadn't noticed. Time out," Hal said, holding up his hand. His lip was bleeding. If it was any consolation (and it was) so was Bruce's. He ran some water over a paper towel, to clean up his lip before it got any worse.

"You mocked me," Bruce said. "What you did."

"What, kissing you? Get over yourself, I did not mock you. I took advantage of you, there's a difference. Like we both don't want to fuck each other's brains out anyway, come on." He winced at the pressure of the paper towel, and pulled it off, examining the blood. "There's no getting the better of you, in hand-to-hand. There's not a single thing I can do that you won't see coming a mile away. The only way to ever catch you off guard is to pull a stunt like that. Emotions are what you're never going to see coming."

He dampened another paper towel and handed it to Bruce, who took it gingerly. "That's your weak spot in a fight, by the way. In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't. And unlike you, I don't make a habit of getting in fights with people to whom I have emotional attachments."

"Oh, okay, I'll just call up Dick and see if he agrees with that."

Bruce was re-folding his paper towel, and said nothing, but his silence said enough. "See," Hal said. "Emotions. It's what you don't see coming that'll get you, every time."

He turned back to the sink and got himself a new paper towel, sticking in a piece of ice this time. "That's really it," he said, to the faucet. "I didn't see it coming. I didn't think any of that had anything to do with me, anymore. Buck, and Amber, and that whole life. I let myself think it was all something that had happened to me, instead of something I was." 

Beside him at the sink, Bruce was rinsing his paper towel, and then he moved Hal's clumsy ice-pack and used his towel to dab at Hal's swelling lower lip, gently. "It was something that happened to you," he said.

"You don't know."

"In this case, I do." And then he laid both their makeshift cold-packs aside, and put a hand on the back of Hal's neck.

"This is going to hurt," Hal said. 

"You have no idea."

* * *

Whatever he had expected about going to bed with Bruce—and sure, he had thought about it over the years, who the hell didn't have the odd sexual fantasy about Batman—the reality was nothing like what he had imagined it might be. For a man who dressed like a black leather dom, he was surprisingly reticent in bed. Quiet, watchful, considerate. 

"What can we do," was the first thing he had whispered, as they fell onto Hal's bed, and Hal had had to think what he meant. 

"I don't know," he whispered back. "What do you want to do?"

"I want to make you come. Please."

"Okay. Bruce?"

"Yeah?"

"My parents aren't home, we don't have to whisper."

He felt the shake of Bruce's quiet laugh against his body. Hal smiled, and then Bruce's mouth was on his again. He was actually a great kisser, for a guy. "So this is something I've never done before," Hal murmured, when Bruce had moved on to his jaw, his neck.

"What, make out?"

"Well. . . that, I guess. Also kissing."

Bruce reared back and looked at him, his face gone unreadable. "Don't pity me," Hal said. "Don't you dare."

"That wasn't what I was doing. Tell me what it is you like, and we'll do that."

Hal took a moment to think. It was hard to think, because while he was taking this moment Bruce was still kissing the side of his face, his neck, his jaw. Bruce's stiff one was still rubbing against him, short-circuiting any higher thought processes. _I don't know what I like, because I've never done anything like this before_ , did not feel like something he could say. In an actual bed, with a guy? A guy whose last name he knew, a guy he actually gave a shit about? This was terra incognita.

"Will you take your shirt off," Hal said instead, and after a moment's hesitation, Bruce did. 

"Holy shit, you're ripped."

Bruce's brow arched, and he started in on the buttons of Hal's shirt. Then he stopped, checked in with Hal's eyes. Hal nodded, and Bruce resumed his unbuttoning. Hal pushed off his shirt. Bruce ran hands over his chest. "I like this," Hal said, and Bruce looked at him like he wasn't sure what he meant. "You asked what I like, and I like this. This is nice."

"Okay," Bruce said, and swallowed. "We don't have to do anything more than this."

"Just this, huh?" He held Bruce's ass in place and pushed up against him, rubbing. "So you would be fine with this."

"Yes."

"You feel pretty hard to me."

"I am."

He kneaded his fingers in that ass. "If we kept doing this, would you come?"

"Yes." Bruce's voice was considerably hoarser now. 

"Hey Bruce."

"Yeah."

"Is it okay. . . can we just leave the rest of our clothes on." He meant that to sound more like a question, but his voice did something weird at the end there. Bruce's hand was stroking his head, Bruce's thumb was brushing his cheekbone.

"This is fine," was all he said. 

Why had he said that. What a stupid thing to say. He didn't really mean it. It was just. . . he could feel the beginnings of something, in the bottom of his stomach, something that was going to make him get up out of this bed and lock himself in the bathroom, and he just didn't know how much more nakedness he could handle. He felt like Bruce had already seen him more naked than anyone else, and he didn't know if he could take any more. He couldn't risk having some sort of freak-out in front of Bruce.

But Bruce seemed unbothered by Hal's weirdness. He was continuing to move his hips against Hal's, to grind slowly. Somehow the extra layers of clothes made it about a thousand times hotter. They rolled around so Hal was on top, and then Bruce again, and somewhere in there Bruce's tongue kept rearranging his tonsils. Hal pulled free with a gasp when he felt—

"Shit I'm gonna come," he moaned. "Oh fuck don't stop—" Bruce's hips ground against him harder, rode him into the mattress. Hal arched his neck back, dug his fingers into Bruce's shoulder. He bit his lip as the spurts flooded his shorts. Bruce's mouth was on his neck. Bruce was reaching a hand down between them, rubbing at his own pants—Bruce needed more friction than he was getting, Hal was terrible at this, he was terrible in bed, Bruce was having an awful time, he was going to laugh at him—

" _God_ ," Bruce groaned, loud enough for the neighbors to hear, and Hal could feel Bruce's hand rubbing between them, and then the long slow shudders of his orgasm. Okay, maybe he wasn't having _that_ terrible a time. 

They didn't do anything afterward but lie there, and Bruce didn't roll off him and he didn't push Bruce off. He just kept his arms around Bruce. For some reason he wanted his face up against Bruce's. "Stay," he whispered.

"Yes," Bruce said. 

"You. . . if you want, you can get out of those clothes. They're probably as gross as mine." He pulled up the covers, and underneath them he struggled out of his pants, kicked off his own boxers, and discreetly wiped himself off. Under the cover of his heavy comforter, it was easily done. 

"You sure this is all right?" Bruce said.

"Yeah, it's. . . it's fine. Sorry about my. . . weirdness."

"Well," Bruce said, sliding under the covers with him, "as you've had occasion to point out, I am not what anyone would call normal."

Hal smiled at that. The covers made lots of things easier. Being naked wasn't so bad, this way. Lazily they began making out again, which kind of surprised him, but if Bruce was more than a one-act show he was not going to complain. They moved more slowly this time, and he noticed that Bruce was careful to keep a fold of the sheet in between them at all times. He could still feel more of Bruce's body this time, and that was definitely a good thing. They lay side by side, and most of it was make-out time. Bruce touched his face a lot. Bruce liked faces. Bruce liked kissing, evidently.

They fell asleep close to dawn, still tangled in about five layers of sheet. He had gotten his hands around Bruce's naked body once or twice, but he noticed Bruce didn't try the same thing on him, but kept his hands on Hal's face and chest. Bruce was a heavy sleeper, which was maybe not that surprising. More surprising was how easy he was to sleep with—or maybe Hal was just tired. Normally he didn't care for having another body sleeping in his bed, but stay had been out of his mouth before he had really thought about it. 

In the gray before dawn, when they had been asleep for maybe an hour, he felt the buzz of a phone. He tried to ignore it, but it kept on, and then there was the insistent ping of a text—several times, in fact. He groped on the floor for the phone and squinted at it. It was Bruce's, and he should have tossed it aside, but the message was right there on the screen. _From Clark_ , it said.

He went ahead and swiped his thumb on it.

 _So? How did the date go???_ read the one from about two hours ago.

And then, from forty-five minutes ago: _Come on, you're killing me here_.

Finally there was the one he had just sent: _OK you jerk. If you don't call me back and let me know what happened, I am going to assume either a) the worst, or b) the best._

Hal considered. He glanced over to where Bruce was stretched beside him, on his stomach, head pillowed on his arms. His leg was thrown across Hal's, a not-unpleasant weight. _Hey Clark_ , Hal typed. _Bruce is going to have to get back to you. HJ_.

He tossed the phone aside without waiting for Clark's answer, and let himself curl back into the warm covers, and the warmer weight inside them.

* * *

There was a dull pounding at the back of Bruce's skull, and he pulled the pillow more firmly over his head. Alfred was banging on the door. If he ignored him he would go away. But the pillow was wrong—too small by half. And the sheets were scratchier than he was used to. He cracked a reluctant eye, and the room fell into place around him.

The pounding was at the front door. He was in Hal's apartment. Hal's bed. He struggled to make himself wake up.

Hal was pulling on pants and muttering to himself. "All right, all right, keep your shirt on. Jesus Christ. If that is Crazy Stacy from the apartment below—we weren't loud or anything, were we?"

Bruce rolled over and considered going back to sleep. Probably just six in the morning, maybe a bit earlier. They couldn't have been asleep that long. He heard Hal unlock the front door, and then a confused rush of sound and voices—Hal's voice rising over all of it. "What the hell? Get your—what the hell are you doing—"

Bruce had vaulted up and found a pair of shorts before he was even fully awake.

Hal was face down on the kitchen table, and a uniformed officer had a bruising grip on his head and a knee in his back. There were two other uniforms, and one non-uniform, and behind him a phalanx of evidence specialists fanning out over the apartment. "Mr. Jordan," one of the other uniforms was saying, "you are under arrest for the murder of Edward Otis Buckman. Anything you say can and will be used against—"

"You keep your mouth shut," Bruce said, over the melée. "Do you understand me? Not a word."

"—you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney—"

"Get your fucking knee out of my back," Hal snapped, as the uniform holding him jabbed him again, and then there was a fist crashing into his head.

"Stop that," Bruce said, "he's not resisting."

"Oh hey looka here," the cop said. "He got himself a boyfriend."

"And you got yourself a lawsuit if you don't let go of him. Who's in charge here?"

"Not you, faggot," the other cop said, and Bruce was being pushed against the doorframe by the bigger cop, who smelled of coffee and stale sweat. His arm was twisted behind his back in an inept hold. 

"And that's your badge," Bruce said through clenched teeth. The knee to his back was vicious, and he broke the hold with ease, elbowing the man right in the paunchy middle before he realized he was not helping Hal, and stopped. The cop hurled him across the room, and then his face was planted next to Hal's on the table, and soon another set of rights was being read aloud. He was facing Hal, and they were both being cuffed, too tight.

Hal turned his head to him. "You're having a bad time, aren't you."

"Oh no, this is spectacular."

The plain-clothes officer gripped his cuffs and moved him to the front door, marching him behind Hal and down the stairs to the waiting squad car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This represents the end of Part One. Remember when I said in the introduction that there would be a little lag between Part One and Part Two? I'm reminding you of that now. I won't post something until it's as perfect as I can possibly make it, and Part Two isn't there yet. So give me a few days before I start posting that, and be patient with me — it's almost finished, but I don't want to jump the gun.


	6. Chapter 6

Detective Grayson leaned against the peeling cinder-block wall and waited. He rattled the small bag of valuables he had signed for at the front desk and chewed his lip. "Dick!" Alfonso called, and Dick forced a smile, trying to return the hearty slap of Alfonso's handshake with something like enthusiasm. He had always liked Alfonso. "Dick Grayson, I don't believe it. What the hell you doing in Coast City, man?"

"Oh, I don't know," Dick said. "I heard you guys had it easy down here, so I thought I'd come check out the lap of luxury. How're they treating you?"

"Awesome, man, couldn't be better. You wanna grab some coffee? I got lunch in twenty, if you can hang a bit."

"Sorry, on business today. Well, personal business. Got a bail-out to take care of. My dad, actually."

Alfonso's wide friendly face split in a grin. "Man, the apple does not fall far from the goddamn tree, does it? If he's the same kinda hell-raiser you are, I can believe it. Tell you what, you here to see the lock-up, you ain't never gonna guess who else we got in the pen today. Just try, you go ahead and guess."

Dick sighed. "I'm going to guess Bruce Wayne."

"They told you at the desk? Man, those assholes spoil everything. And you ain't never gonna guess what he was wearing when —"

"Alfonso, I'm thinking maybe we never had that conversation about who my dad is." 

But then there were steps coming down the hall, and Bruce was being accompanied by a guard, and the minute Dick saw Bruce the polite smile was wiped from his face. He whipped around to Alfonso.

"You get me that arrest report," he said through gritted teeth. "Who the hell made this collar?"

"Hey now," Alfonso said. "This ain't Bludhaven. You ain't no detective here."

"Then I'll call the Coast City chief of police, which I really don't think you want me to do. Maybe he can explain why my father's face looks like some asshole with a nightstick decided he wanted to have a little fun, and are those _cuff_ bruises? What the fuck happened here?"

Alfonso was holding his hands up. "Hey man, I didn't know he was related to you. The report said resisting arrest, I just read it like everybody else. I didn't think that—"

"Leave it," Bruce said. "We don't have time for this. Let's go."

"What the hell are you wearing? They jumpsuited you, what the hell is going on here?"

"I was unclothed at the time of arrest."

"That's the part I was gonna tell you," Alfonso unhelpfully chimed in. 

" _Now_ ," Bruce said, and he hadn't stopped walking. "Do you have my phone?"

"Yeah, but—"

Bruce snatched it and in two thumb swipes had the number. "Liana," he said. "Do you have him?"

Dick was practically jogging to keep up. "Bruce, wait up just a second here. Do you mind telling me what is going on here? Liana called me an hour ago and said you had been arrested, and I don't even know what—"

Bruce held up his hand. "Damn," he said. "That soon? Yes, yes, I understand that. All right, you get every available person in your office working on this between now and this four o'clock bail hearing. There may not be much possibility of it, but the hearing is going to be the first opportunity to assess the strength of the state's case here, and—yes, I understand that, I'm not telling you how to do your job, but you're not realizing that— _no_ , I am not trying to distract you as you prepare this case, I'm simply trying to ensure that—"

He held the phone and looked at it. "She hung up," he said. "Unbelievable. Quarter million dollar retainer, and she hung up on me. In fairness, I'm not paying her a quarter of a million dollars because she is a nice person."

"Bruce." They were in the parking lot now, and Dick grabbed his arm. Alfonso was still watching them from the doorway, and wasn't that going to be an interesting conversation to have tomorrow. "Bruce. Stop a second. Please tell me what the hell is going on. What bail hearing are you talking about? You've been released, probably because I was Liana's second call, and her first was to Jim Gordon, but now there's a hearing? Please tell me what the hell is going on here!"

Bruce paused and looked at him like he was just now registering Dick's presence. The blossom of bruise on his jaw looked worse in the sunlight, but he seemed unaware of it. "Hell is going on here," he said tersely, wrenching open the door of Dick's car. "Get in, I'm driving."

"Because of course you are," Dick sighed.

* * *

There was no bail, and in truth he had not expected there to be. 

Hal was silent and stared only straight ahead during the all-too-brief hearing. The point had really been to let Liana take the measure of the prosecution's case and connect with Hal, though Hal didn't appear to speak to her at all. She was a slim gray shark slicing her way around the courtroom, and those canny dark eyes watched the prosecutors carefully, and her client even more carefully.

"Here is the list of good news," she said to him afterward. "It's second-degree murder, which is the best that can be hoped for. Whether they believe it or not, the state has no way to prove premeditation. There were other people on the street, and they saw Buckman approach the two of you. He was clearly the initiator of the encounter, and that goes a long way."

"My testimony will be useful there."

She gave him a sharp look. "Your testimony is largely useless. Unless, of course, we could exclude the circumstances of your arrest, which I might reasonably be able to do. But that's the soft underbelly of your testimony, and any decent prosecutor is going to slice you open right across it."

He winced. "Understood."

"So you see why I say the presence of other people on the street when Buckman initiated the encounter is such a stroke of good luck. It's the absolute best-case scenario, because with the amount of motivation Hal has for premeditation, this could easily have been murder one."

"Excellent," he said. 

"There's more good news. There are no witnesses to the murder itself, and the weapon has yet to be recovered. Of course, murder weapons are recovered in only a small percentage of successfully prosecuted murder cases, but still, that opens up the smallest bit of doubt in a jury's mind."

"Amount of motivation," Bruce said. "So they know Buck's connection to Hal."

"In detail," she said. "It's why they were so quick to make the arrest. Apparently he was in possession of recordings, certain tapes that—"

"Good God," he said, and he put his head in his hands. 

"You know about them."

"Yes."

"You see why first-degree murder would have been an easy case to make."

"Yes."

She tapped her pencil against her desk. Bruce watched her considering him. "My job will be easier," she said, "if you could persuade my client to talk to me."

"Ah. Well, he can be. . . stubborn."

"Right now he's saying he's going to refuse representation."

"I'll talk to him."

"Does that often work?"

"No," he said grimly. 

She gathered her papers, stacking each group of three so their edges lined up, and placing them exactly five-eighths of an inch apart. She was probably on quite a bit of medication for that OCD, but every bit of Liana's considerable emotional deficit had always worked for him, from a legal point of view, and he was counting on that here too. "You said there was a list of good news," he said. "Which implies the presence of a list of bad news."

"Yes."

"What's the bad news?"

"I'm not taking this to trial."

His jaw clenched. "No deal," he said. "I've got your firm on retainer, but you're the one I want in that courtroom. No one else takes this to trial."

"You misunderstand me. No one takes this to trial. I recommend he plea this out."

"No. Absolutely not."

"Are you under the impression there is some sort of available win here? My client has not just a mountain of motivation to have committed this murder, he has the Mt. Everest of all motivations. Personal revenge, lingering trauma, clearly intended blackmail—it's a prosecutor's pick-six, it's a goddamn wet dream. Only an idiot takes this to trial."

"Then I'll hire an idiot."

"You push this to trial, he will walk away with life in prison, I promise you that. We have a victim with an eight-inch hunting knife in his belly, and five entry wounds. We have the victim's blood in Hal's apartment, on Hal's hands. And we have a perpetrator who was found in celebratory _flagrante delicto_ the following morning."

"For heaven's sake," he growled.

"In celebratory gay _flagrante_."

He pushed back his chair and stalked to the window of her office. Her office was almost as large as his. She was maybe half his size, and barely broke five feet. It happened all the time, that prosecutors underestimated her in a courtroom; he had seen it happen numerous times. She was a woman, she was small, she was soft-spoken, she was black. Opposing counsel after opposing counsel ignored her, until they were lying on the floor in a pool of their own blood, and her calm sweet smile above them. A pool of blood like the crime scene photos of Edward Buckman. 

"I refuse to think," he said, "that that would make a difference."

"Refuse to think it all you want. I defend cases in the real world, not the fantasy world where sexists, racists, and homophobes don't sit on juries every day of the week. And I'm telling you, there's no win here. If he gets a deal—and this is a good case for them to take to trial, there's no guarantee there's even going to be an offer—then I'm going to advise him to take it. Assuming, that is, he agrees to representation."

"I understand," he said after a while. The view from her window was almost as good as his, and hers hadn't been handed to her on a silver platter. She had worked for this view, and that represented more sheer will and determination than he had seen in just about any other civilian. He ought to expand her purview, make her the League's official lawyer. 

"I understand," he repeated. "But there are some things you don't understand. About who your client is, about who I am. There are compelling circumstances that mean this case has to go to trial, and it has to be won."

"Compelling circumstances," she said, folding her prim hands. "Mr. Wayne. Are you under the impression I don't know who I'm working for?"

That turned him from the window. She regarded him steadily. "I've known for quite some time. I know most of the Justice League's identity. And I'm telling you, it doesn't change my answer. This is the best counsel I can give anyone, I don't care who they are."

"You're quite a bit frightening," he said.

"That's why I work for you."

"Point conceded," he said, turning back to the window. 

It was two days before he could see Hal, and when he finally saw him, he had to fight the surge of bile and panic that rose in his throat at the sight of Hal Jordan in jailhouse browns. The visitation room was at least private, here in the city jail: a chipped linoleum table, two creaky chairs, a guard outside the door. Hal just looked at the opposite wall, like he had in the courtroom. 

"What the hell are you doing here," he said.

"Don't be ridiculous. Why did you tell Liana you didn't want representation?"

"Because I don't. Are we done?"

"Hell no we're not done."

"Guess what, we're done when I tell the guard we're done. Unless you'd like to start an argument with him too."

"So what is your plan? Pretend this isn't happening? Stick a knife in your own gut in the middle of the courtroom? You can't change what's happened, but you can change what happens going forward."

For the first time Hal's eyes flicked to him. "Aren't you going to ask me if I did it?"

"I don't need to ask a question I already know the answer to."

"You think you know the answer."

"Listen to me," Bruce said, leaning forward. "Turning away representation is not the solution here. A competent lawyer can—"

"I don't need your lawyer," Hal said. His brows knit together. "I don't want your lawyer. I never asked for your lawyer. I didn't sign up for your thousand-dollar-an-hour slick-as-hell designer lawyer. I didn't say I was refusing representation, I'm just refusing _that_ representation. I'll take whatever court-appointed shlub they assign me, I don't give a shit."

"That's idiotic."

"Maybe so. But sometimes that's just what you do. Sometimes there is no solution, ever think about that one? Sometimes you just take what's coming to you."

"Why are you trying to convince me you did this?"

Hal tipped his head back and shut his eyes. "Just leave me alone," he said. "Can't you just do that."

"No."

"Please just get out of here." He had still not opened his eyes, and it occurred to Bruce that was not so much frustration as exhaustion. If Hal had slept more than four hours in the last two days, he would be surprised. 

"Listen to me," Bruce said again. He kept his voice calm and steady. "You're not going to win at trial. You're not going to win in a plea deal. The only win here is if I can find who actually did this, and soon. But you need to give me time to do that. I can't undo something foolish like a confession, or a disastrous lack of representation. Finding the actual murderer isn't going to do any good if you're making the state's case for them. Don't fall on your sword just yet, is what I'm saying."

"Right," Hal said wearily. "Because there's always an answer, and Batman is going to find it. Jesus Christ. Does the phrase 'cut your losses' mean nothing to you?"

"Not particularly."

Hal rested his forehead in his hand. His shoulders started shaking, and Bruce realized he was laughing. "You are one stubborn son of a bitch," he said. 

"Yes."

"Bruce." Hal sighed, and looked at him like he was trying to explain life to an especially hard-headed two-year-old. "Look. Remember when you came to my apartment and told me about paying off Amber? You said. . . you said that about not being a billionaire because you hired incompetent lawyers, and I said, aren't you a billionaire because your parents were. Remember that?"

"I do."

"Well, that's the thing. We're all who we were born to be. I was born to trash, and you were born to billionaires, and sometimes, try as hard as you will, you can't change who you are. I had a really good run of it, I really did. But that's all it ever was, just dress-up. I couldn't really escape those people, any more than you can escape being a Wayne. This is just. . . who I am. Maybe this. . . maybe this is where I belong. So just walk out of here and forget about this whole thing, all right? Just. . . forget about me."

"Not really possible," Bruce said softly. 

Hal got up and banged on the door. "Don't do that," Bruce said, but Hal ignored him. 

"Guard," he called. "I'm ready."

"Please think about what I've said," Bruce tried, but Hal was already being escorted out the door, and neither the burly bearded guard nor Hal looked back at him. He was left standing at the door of the reeking little room. It was a childish satisfaction, but he picked up the hideous chair and hurled it into the wall. Its metal bracket came loose and clattered to the floor. Bruce kicked the pieces of it, viciously, then stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. There was a videocamera in the corner of the room, so he was sure to be presented with a bill for the chair, and probably a summons, but he could give a damn.

* * *

The day of the sentencing Hal got to wear actual clothes, which was pretty goddamn hilarious when you thought about it. He could see why you wore actual clothes at a trial, when a jury might need to see you looking like something other than a murderous jumpsuited thug, but what the purpose was for a sentencing, when all parties were more or less agreed that he was in fact a murderous thug, he had no idea. He hadn't even thought a court appearance for sentencing would be necessary; hadn't the DA already agreed to the sentence? But apparently the money shot for DA's office was for him to stand in a courtroom and hear the sentence read out loud to him, which seemed like a ridiculous waste of everybody's time, not to mention a dry cleaning bill. 

He had steeled himself to it, though. It was just one last thing to be gotten through. He had not thought it would be difficult—or at least, not until he had been escorted into the courtroom (escorted, what a euphemism that was for every movement in his life now) and seen just about everyone he knew assembled there. 

"For fuck's sake," he muttered to the lawyer, who did what she made a regular habit of doing and pretended he hadn't said anything. 

In the row behind the defense table (and why was it even a defense table, this was a sentencing, he wasn't _defending_ against anything) sat Bruce, and Clark, and Oliver, and Dinah, and Barry: a straight-backed phalanx of them, all looking right at him. For fuck's sake. And behind them, other people. Reporters, from the look of them, and that surprised him. He knew the story had some traction because of the connection to Bruce Wayne, though he had thought maybe the lack of a trial would have helped with that. At a trial, Bruce would have had to testify. That five million dollars would have been discussed, at a trial, and the reason for it. Bruce's name would have been dragged through the mud even more than it had been, and for no reason: the result would have been the same, according to the terrifying termagant of a lawyer sitting to his left, whose judgment he had no reason to doubt.

He was doing the right thing. That didn't make it any easier.

The judge began with reading the charges, which involved a formal rehearsal of the case from the prosecution. The whole thing was ridiculous, and Hal just stared resolutely at the wall behind the judge, and the big brass state seal on the wall. Most ridiculously of all, a recess for lunch was declared after the review of the case. It was like some sort of weird Orwellian pantomime, from first to last, and Hal rolled his eyes when they all had to rise so the judge could take a break from a hard morning's work of sitting in an ergonomically designed chair for forty-five minutes in order to go have lunch. 

"You'll have to eat in the courthouse," Terrifying Lawyer Lady said. "We can order sandwiches in the conference room, if you want."

"Oh, what the fuck ever," he sighed, rubbing at his forehead. 

It was the most painfully silent lunch of his life: all of them in the conference room, chewing their sandwiches like they were suddenly deeply interesting. Worse had been the conversation before the sandwiches, because Bruce had left to pick up food from the deli next to the courthouse, and Barry had chosen this time to ask questions about the case.

"It just doesn't make _sense_ ," he said, for about the thousandth time. 

"Well, Bar, write a letter to your congressman, I don't know what to tell you."

"But. . . surely if there were a trial, if you had a chance to _prove_ to people you were innocent—"

"Well damn Barry, that hadn't occurred to me," he said, tossing aside yesterday's newspaper some previous occupant had left in this miserable room. "You think maybe if I just explained to people how I didn't in fact gut this asshole with an eight-inch hunting knife, I could go home now?"

"But a trial would at least give you a chance, instead of signing your life away," Barry protested. 

"There's a ninety-nine-percent chance a trial would get me life in prison, as opposed to the fifteen to twenty I got here, so if it's all right with you I think I'll take that deal and maybe have some life left over at the end of this, is that all right with you?"

"Barry's just trying to understand," Dinah said gently, and he knew he was being too sharp, but he could really give a fuck. 

Barry glanced at the newspaper. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know—I realize you don't want to talk about all this right now, but we're all still trying to figure out how best to help you here."

"Oh, get in line," Hal said, "Batman's got it all figured out, I'm sure. He'll be happy to tell you what the best thing to do is, on account of knowing every fucking thing in the universe." Clark lifted an eyebrow at that, but offered no retort. 

"Okay, that's another thing," Barry said, leaning forward across the table. "What the hell does _Bruce_ have to do with any of this? If I believe what I read in the papers—which by the way I don't—he was at your apartment when you were arrested that morning, wearing like next to no clothes? What the hell? The papers made it sound like the two of you were having sex, or something, so excuse me if I'm just a little skeptical of what I've been reading."

"Well allow me to clear things right up for you," Hal said. "Barry. Listen very closely. Bruce was at my apartment that morning because we were having sex, which we were doing because we are two consenting adults who very much wanted to. Does that help you out any?" 

"Oh, so now you're not only a murderer, but _gay?"_

"Apparently. Why do I get the feeling it's the second thing you object to the most?"

Barry was staring at him, tight-jawed. Then he pushed back his chair and stalked from the room, letting the door slam behind him. They were all quiet. Hal just wanted his damn sandwich. "Excuse me," Clark said, and he got up and followed Barry out. 

Ollie put a hand on his shoulder, and squeezed. Hal sat in silence with Ollie and Dinah until the sandwiches arrived. Bruce distributed their orders and said nothing about their funereal quiet, or about Clark and Barry's absence. It was a room full of much intent chewing. After a minute or so Oliver set his sandwich down. "Honey, I need to talk to you a second," he said, getting up and brushing off his sandwich crumbs. Dinah looked unsurprised, and followed him out of the room too.

"Smooth," Hal said when they were gone, balling up his napkin and tossing it at the crumpled bag. Bruce was not eating anything. The seconds were ticking by—the last seconds he would ever have with Bruce alone, probably. There was too much to say. Poking at any of it just made the ache in his chest worse. 

"Listen," he said. "It occurs to me. . . I never did get a chance to say thank you."

Bruce's eyes were startled. Look at that, he had actually surprised the Batman. Score one for Lantern. "You're thanking me," Bruce said. "You have an overdeveloped sense of irony."

"You think I'm blaming you?"

"You ought to."

Hal snorted, shook his head. "You didn't do a damn thing but try to help," he said. "I may have been pissed that night and said a lot of different things, but I know the truth. And the truth is, there probably wasn't any way to prevent all this, from the minute Amber found that box. A dozen different roads, maybe, but they all end in the same place. So hell no, I don't blame you. I'm sorry if. . . you know, you thought I did."

"It's all right."

"No it isn't. I fucked up but good. And I'm sorry I. . . fucked this up too," he said, with some vague gesture between the two of them that he realized could have meant anything. Bruce would know what he meant. 

"I very much enjoyed dinner with you," Bruce said.

"Yeah," Hal said through a suddenly tight throat. "Me too. Well, tell you what, in fifteen to twenty, you can buy. I'll look you up."

Bruce said nothing to that. Suddenly there was a hand gripping his. He wanted to throw it off, but somehow he couldn't, quite. He found himself gripping it back. It was a strong hand. It made him stronger, somehow.

"Apparently Barry's pissed at me, now. So that's a thing."

"He'll get over it."

"And everyone else doesn't know what the hell to say."

"They'll get over it."

"It's time," Terrifying Lawyer Lady said, sticking her head into the room, and then out again. 

"She scares the fuck out of me," Hal said.

"She ought to."

"I almost forgot," Hal said. He pulled his Green Lantern ring from his pocket, and placed it in Bruce's other hand. "Keep it safe, will you? The Guardians will be wanting that back at some point, but don't expect a big ceremony. It will just float away when they're ready for it, whenever they've found my replacement."

"There is no replacement," Bruce said, and for the first time Hal heard something strange in his voice, something tight and low. 

"Well, I doubt they'll agree. And listen. . . shit, I haven't dealt with any of this other stuff, but my apartment—just. . . I don't know, sell everything, do whatever, I don't care. I don't have anything that valuable. If you want you can just call up Goodwill and have them come get everything, donate it somewhere. I was gonna ask Barry to deal with it, but—"

"I'll take care of it."

"I have to get back in there," Hal said. "I have to see this through."

"Yes," Bruce said. Hal looked at their joined hands. They looked nice together. Roughly the same size and shape, but Bruce's skin was paler than his own tanned hand. 

"It was a pleasure working with you," Hal said, as he stood. "And an honor."

"The honor was mine," Bruce said, that same strange tautness in his voice. And then there was a hand on the back of his neck. Bruce was waiting for permission, and Hal leaned in and brushed his lips against Bruce's. It was nice to kiss someone exactly his same height. Their kiss was slow and lazy, like they had the whole day, the whole year, their whole lives in front of them, instead of just thirty more seconds. 

"Take care of yourself," Hal whispered. "Try to not get yourself killed out there, all right?"

And then he had pushed away from Bruce, and headed out the door back to the courtroom, and into the long tunnel of the next twenty years.


	7. Chapter 7

It wasn't as though he didn't have a place to start his investigation.

He knew exactly where to begin, even if the District Attorney did not. The trail to follow was the one that had led Buck up to Gotham and Coast City to begin with, and that was going to mean picking up Buck's trail in Kentucky. Specifically, it was going to mean locating Amber Jordan once again, because every instinct in him said that was where to start.

"Well, a couple of problems with that theory," Dick said, plucking through his Mongolian beef as they ran bank account scans on the computer. 

Bruce grunted, but that was all the encouragement Dick usually needed. "First off," he said around a mouth of bamboo shoots, "you're assuming this asshole's death had anything to do with his blackmail attempt, or with Hal at all. I think there's a perfectly equal chance this guy got himself into another fight with some random person, after Hal left him."

"Possibly," Bruce conceded. He had a timeline of that night up on another screen, re-constructed down to the minute. The problem was, Hal had had plenty of time to kill Buck. According to Hal's summary of events, he had left Buck shortly after Bruce himself had left the scene. He had gotten in a few more hits, and then decided it wasn't worth it, and that if he didn't leave, he might do something he would regret. He had then spent an hour and a half wandering, mainly sitting near the boathouse in Middlevale Park, thinking, before he headed back to his apartment.

"Problem number two," Dick said, sifting through his fried rice, "is that Amber Jordan would be a heck of a lot easier to find if someone hadn't just given her five million dollars. Let's be honest, she could be anywhere, with that kind of getaway cash."

"Mm," Bruce said. 

Dick set his rice down and studied Bruce. He could see it coming a mile away, and deepened his frown in an attempt to intimidate Dick away from asking the question he knew was coming. If Dick had ever been intimidated by him, that had been over by about the time he was nine and a half. "So here's the other thing," Dick said.

"Mm."

"All this is assuming the real killer is not already sitting in prison upstate."

Bruce said nothing, but continued to scan records. "Bruce," Dick said, because when had the boy ever been put off by his silence? "Come on, it's reasonable to ask it."

"You're asking me if Hal Jordan is lying."

"I'm asking. . . look, everyone makes mistakes. It sounds like, from what I can piece together, which I'm sure is not everything, but it sounds like Hal had plenty of reason to want this asshole dead. And before you turn your whole life over to this crusade—and I know you, I see all the signs, I can see that the cave is about to become the Hal Jordan War Room—I'm just saying, before that happens, maybe we should ask the hard questions here."

"The hard questions," he said. "You mean, the questions the Gotham Gazette and every East Coast news organ has been asking for six weeks? Excellent work. I can't imagine the mental acuity required to parrot what you hear on TV."

"Come on," Dick said quietly. "You know I want Hal to be innocent as much as you do. But maybe. . . maybe I don't _need_ Hal to be innocent as much as you do."

His only answer was more silence. Bruce was grateful for the cowl, and the armor of his suit. In truth, there was no answer to Dick's question, which was not as ridiculous as he implied. He couldn't explain to Dick how he knew Hal was innocent. He simply knew it, on instinct, and he was far too old and practiced to distrust that deep still voice when it spoke to him. Of course, Dick would counter that it wasn't his gut he was listening to, but something a little south of there. That was what Dick had meant to say. Dick believed his emotions were getting in the way of his objectivity. But he wouldn't tolerate that conversation, even—or especially—from Dick. And in his experience, objectivity was not all that helpful, in an investigation. Investigations ran not on objectivity but on passion, on hunches, on bone-deep irrational conviction, and Dick ought to know that better than anybody. Dick ought to know him better than anybody. 

The first weekend visitation, Bruce had driven the three hours upstate and waited in the plastic chairs for his fifteen minutes in a crowded room with Hal. It was clear Hal had not expected him. "What the hell are you doing here," was all he had said, by way of greeting.

Bruce had sat down at the little table, trying to ignore the conversations at the tables around them, the little babies squeezed into frilly headbands to be paraded in front of tattooed fathers, the women talking in a cacophony of voices—recriminatory, intent, despairing—at the men who sat in sullen silence or talked back at them in a body language of longing and frustration. "I brought you some things," he said. "I thought I might as well drive them up. Just things I thought might be useful."

"Take them back," Hal said. 

"Too late, I dropped them at the inspection station. They'll bring them to you tomorrow sometime, I would imagine. Throw them away if you don't want them."

"Dammit," Hal said, and he put his head in his hands. "Look," he said. "You can't come up here. You can't be here."

Bruce was dressed in jeans and a T shirt, a scuffed jacket and a low-billed cap. He looked like any other visitor. "It's not like I brought the Lamborghini," he said in a low voice.

"Yeah, because _that's_ my objection, is your car. Jesus, Bruce, what the hell are you trying to do? What the fuck did you come here for?"

"I—"

"I can't do this if you keep showing up here, all right? This is my life now. I have to make this life work, and you're not doing me any favors by reminding me that that other life exists out there. Got it?"

"No," Bruce said. "This is not your life now. I won't accept that. Your life is outside these walls, and you're going to be re-joining it just as soon as my investigation is complete. Until then, I'm going to be reminding you of where your life really is."

"Sweet Jesus," Hal sighed. "You really are fucking delusional. You're on medication, right? At least tell me that."

Bruce concentrated on his hands resting on the table. "We are beginning to make progress with the investigation," he said. "Tracking down Amber is the first hurdle. Once that's accomplished, we'll have a clearer picture of where we go from here."

"Where you go from here is the parking lot," Hal said angrily. He stood, kicking back his chair, and stalked to the doorway. There was a glass enclosure where inmates waited to be escorted back to their cells. Hal stood there with his hands behind his back, looking at the clock up on the wall. Bruce had no choice but to get up and leave, tugging his cap down further as he went, just in case someone got curious. 

He sat in his car for a while before he drove away, just staring at his hands gripping the wheel.

* * *

It was four days later that a letter arrived. Alfred placed all mail that came to the house on a small silver tray in the front hall, and once or twice a week Bruce would leaf through it idly, trusting that anything of a more personal nature Alfred would bring to his attention at once. But this day he went through the mail before Alfred had a chance to, and he saw the thin envelope with _Watson Correctional Facility_ stamped across the upper left, and he had torn into it with quick fingers.

 _This is where I apologize for being such a giant dick_ , read the first line, shorn of prologue, and Bruce sank into the chair by the hall table to read.

 _You didn't deserve that_ , the letter continued. _It's just been a tough week, which is a stupid thing to say, I guess, because it's my first week in prison, and what the hell did I expect. I don't really have anything to say in this letter. I have no idea if you'll even read it. I just wanted to say I was wrong, to be such an asshole when you drove all that way to visit. And I also wanted to say thank you for the things—the books, and the socks (socks are gold around here, you have no idea), and the food. Thanks for not making it too healthy. Food is also good for trading around here, prison being the world's most thriving barter economy. My cellmate was an economics major in college, and likes to draw flow charts of economic exchange patterns here at Watson. You two would get along great._

There was a break, like maybe he was thinking about writing more, and then just a scrawled _HJ_ at the bottom of the page. Bruce read it three times. With the letter still in his hand, he went down the hall to his library, pulling open drawers until he found what he was looking for—plain correspondence paper that didn't have his monogram on it. He rifled for a pen, and sat down immediately to write.

 _Thank you for your letter_ , he wrote, and then stopped, thinking. He crumpled the paper up, tossed it aside, and reached for another one.

 _Dear Hal_ , he wrote this time. _Thank you for writing. No apology was necessary. If you cared to write more, I would very much like to hear from you when you have time._

He stared at the blank piece of paper. He needed to keep him updated on the investigation. But then he thought of Hal in that place with the peeling paint and the reek of antiseptic barely covering the deeper reek of urine, and he tapped his pen on the desk. _You might be interested to hear I took Damian uptown to Fort Vallon Park, he wrote. After the (mis)adventure with the flaming sword, I decided a little more outdoor time might be in order. I'm not sure if I mentioned the story, at dinner the other night, about Damian decapitating the heads of Alfred's topiaries, followed by graphic dismemberment, but that was also a thing that happened, shortly after he came to live with us. So for a variety of reasons I thought turning him loose on the outdoor world—or at least, the outdoor world where the state was responsible for the clean-up bill—might be a good idea._

_So last Sunday afternoon we drove up to Fort Vallon, and Damian whetted his sword the whole drive up there. I brought sunglasses and a book and sat on a bench while Damian attacked local flora, thankfully out of sight of other people, though Fort Vallon tends to be quieter and more deserted than parks closer to the city. A woman came and sat beside me for a while—a pleasant older woman who teaches Greek at Gotham University, and who was taking her grandson for an outing. We chatted about Herodotus for a while. Her grandson was about Damian's age, and he had a kite he had engineered and built himself. Damian cut the kitestring, and the (perfectly designed, I should point out) kite flew away on the breeze, unrecoverable. He didn't mean to cut the kitestring; he had been practicing a sword hurl at the top of a Japanese elm, and the kitestring was an unintended casualty._

_That was the end of my pleasant conversation._

_It's not entirely my own awkwardness that makes normal social interaction so difficult. Sooner or later, Damian is sure to show up and set something on fire, and that is the end of that. I'm fairly sure that were my night job—as you called it—not what it is, I would still be constrained to take up something like that, just in order to keep my son occupied._

He got up and went to the shelves of his library, quickly scanning for the book he wanted. He didn't find it, and had to fetch the sliding ladder. Possibly it had been mis-shelved. He was on top of the ladder when Alfred stuck his head in the library door. 

"Everything all right, sir?"

"Yes. Just. . . searching for something."

Alfred watched him for a minute, then slid the library door closed without comment. "There you are," Bruce muttered, descending the ladder with the copy he had been looking for. He returned to his letter.

 _I'm sending you a translated copy of Herodotus, who it just occurred to me you might enjoy. Even in translation, his writing is fresh and engaging, and he's the sort of historian who re-tells the old stories and legends, searching for the nugget of truth buried in them. It's an approach to tradition that appeals to me: respect for the past combined with a scientific examination of fact._

He studied what he had written. He sounded like the most boring individual on the face of the planet. It was probably better to wrap this up before it got any worse.

 _Anyway_ , he wrote, _it also occurred to me you might not have brought with you a list of crucial phone numbers. I know you can make some limited phone calls, so I am also enclosing numbers you might want to have, including my own cell. Feel free to call it at any time._

He looked at that last. From a certain point of view, that might be read as overly pleading, pathetic even. He could re-write this page and leave out that last sentence. He decided to leave it. Jordan could do with it what he will, and ignore the overture if he chose. But he would make the gesture, nonetheless. 

He sent the letter, and the book along with it, then worried that he ought to have sent them separately. The book was sure to be delayed by inspection, and by sending them together, all he had done was make sure his letter would be delayed too. By Saturday morning, he still hadn't heard anything. If he was going to make the drive upstate, he needed to leave soon. If he got there and Hal didn't want to see him, all he had to do was tell the guard no. On the other hand, Hal's letter had not actually said _I changed my mind, please come visit me_. It had been more of an apology for the way he had phrased things, not for what he had said, exactly. Only an idiot would get in the car and drive three hours for round two of rejection.

So that was of course precisely what he did. 

He sat in the same chairs, and waited at the same table, and everyone else came to see their visitors, but no one came to sit at the table with him. He stared at the dirty formica tabletop and felt the muscle in his jaw clenching and unclenching. And then there was someone in a brown jumpsuit—he had graduated from the orange, evidently—standing at his table, and Bruce stood, and Hal's smile was rueful, as he sat down.

"Stubborn son of a bitch, aren't you," was Hal's greeting.

 _So I've been told_ , or _you knew that a long time ago_ , or even _that's what's kept me alive all these years_. Any of those would have been an acceptably suave response, instead of the one that did come out of his mouth, which was: "I do in fact take medication."

Hal didn't look surprised. That was the advantage of dealing with someone with equally poor social skills: the bar was agreeably low. "Oh yeah?" he said. "For those delusions?"

"For the bipolar disorder."

Hal nodded. "Well, that fits. Is that what you meant about finding Dinah useful?"

"Yes."

"Good to know. I still don't feel sorry for you, though. I'm the one in prison."

"That explains the terrible clothes."

Hal grinned at that, a slow patented spread of smile, the kind of smile that in recent years had made Bruce focus aggressively on his hands or the table or anywhere but that maddening smile. Once, it had been at a League meeting, and Hal had been sitting across from him—Bruce usually tried to avoid an unobstructed view, because that just made it worse, but this day there had been no preventing it—and Hal had leaned back and put his feet on the table and stretched those arms behind his head and given that long slow smile, and Bruce's heart rate had shot up about thirty beats per minute, at least. He figured it was at least that, because Clark sitting next to him had slowly turned and fixed him with this _look_ , and Bruce had just scowled at him. 

He had strode out of the meeting quickly when it was over, cape snapping behind him, but not fast enough to avoid Clark. "Hold up there," Clark had said, with a hand on the elevator door and an irritatingly knowing smile.

"We're not having this discussion."

"Oh, we are so having this discussion." And he had pushed the button to slide the lift doors closed, then jammed the lever. "And before you try to deny this, keep in mind that I can track all your body's physical responses. All of them."

"For God's sake," Bruce had sighed.

"And here I thought you hated Hal," Clark had said with a smile.

"I _do_."

"Because he turns you on."

"He does _not_ —"

Clark had held up a hand. " _All_ of them," he repeated. 

"It doesn't require superhuman ability to see what happens to your body around Diana," Bruce had snapped. "I practically slipped and broke my neck in that puddle of drool the other day."

Clark had just laughed his easygoing laugh. "One of these days," he had said. "One of these days, my friend, you will not be able to ignore this any longer. Chickens have a way of coming home to roost."

"And Kansans have a way of spouting useless platitudes." Clark had just shaken his head, laughing softly, because all Bruce's barbs just bounced off that impervious chest. Well. Not once in the last eight weeks had Clark said anything like _I told you so_ , or been anything other than supportive. That was another thing about Kansans. 

"I was afraid you wouldn't come back," Hal said. He didn't seem to notice Bruce's moment of abstraction, or to mind if he did. 

"Saturdays are kind of a down day for me. Nothing much else to do."

"Thank you for the book. And the letter. I. . . what I said last week, about where my life is. . . just ignore that, all right?"

There was some snappy comeback to that, something about ignoring everything that came out of Hal's mouth anyway, but Bruce could not at the moment locate it. He just let himself smile, a little bit, and Hal smiled back, and then he was licking his lips and leaning forward. "Listen," he said. "So, this is important to know. There can be touching at the beginning of a visit, and at the end. Nothing overly explicit, and no kissing, obviously, but they let us do that much. The thing is, I can't touch you. You understand that, right?"

"Yes," Bruce said. 

"We can shake hands."

"All right," he said. 

"It's just that—"

"Hal. You do not need to explain to me how homophobia works, or the nature of social hierarchies in a prison."

"Fair enough," Hal said.

"I've actually been in prison."

Hal blinked at him. "You what," he said.

"In China. For about six months. This was before my training seriously began, or at least before it had focus. I was undercover, and got caught in a sweep, and I was in prison for about six months. I could have gotten out at any time by alerting Lucius or someone in the company where I was, but it was excellent practice, being there. I learned a great deal."

Hal's finger was tapping on the table. "You realize this story makes me want to strangle you."

"I can see that, yes."

The bell sounded, and Bruce frowned. Surely it hadn't been—didn't he get longer—

But Hal was rising. He kept his eyes on Hal's. Hal extended his hand, and Bruce gripped it, as hard as he could, and as Hal's hand slid out of his, he tried to keep his fingers from convulsively gripping at Hal's hand as it slipped away from him. He stood there and watched Hal go, then he cut his eyes quickly downward, because if it was on his face that would not help Hal. 

This time when he sat in the car, he gripped the steering wheel and yelled, as loud as he could.


	8. Chapter 8

When Clark had followed Barry out of the courthouse the day of Hal's sentencing, he hadn't had a thought in mind but kicking Barry's ass into the pavement. "Wait up," he had called, but Barry had already stopped. He was leaning against the brick wall of the courthouse, in the back parking lot. He looked like he was about to be sick, but Clark wasn't in the mood to feel sorry for him. 

"Barry," he said. "Barry, what the hell was that about?"

Barry just shook his head. "Forget it," he mumbled.

"I really don't think I will, actually. What the hell did you think you were doing in there?"

"Asking my friend some questions," he said, through gritted teeth.

"Really. Because it sounded like you being an asshole, to me. It also sounded like you being homophobic as hell, so let me tell you a thing. You can think whatever you want—I'm not the thought police, and you can be as big an idiot in your own head as you want to be. But if I ever hear a single _word_ out of your mouth, to Hal, or to Bruce, or to _anyone_ on the face of this planet, that comes even _close_ to homophobic b.s., I will—"

"Shut up," Barry said, turning a ravaged face to him. "Just shut the fuck up, all right?" Something about the man's face stopped him. He looked like a whipped dog. "That wasn't. . . that wasn't what I meant, all right?"

"All right," Clark said. "Well, that was sure what it sounded like. And look, none of us are having an easy time right now, but we owe it to Hal to save our own self-pity for later."

"Now you sound like Batman," Barry said bitterly. 

"I would imagine that's true. Come on, let's get back in there. Hal deserves to see all of us there with him, even if—"

"What the hell for," Barry said. "What the hell does he need anyone else for? He's got Bruce paying for his lawyer, and Bruce buying his sandwiches, and Bruce giving him shitty advice that's sending him to prison for twenty years, and Bruce taking over everything like he always does, and hell, apparently he's got Bruce sucking his cock too, like the big faggot he—"

Clark's fist moved faster even than Barry could see, and landed in the man's middle with a deeply satisfying _thwunk_ that forced the air out Barry's lungs and doubled him over, staggering. 

"You watch your filthy mouth," Clark said, his jaw trembling as he tried to control his anger. He had Barry pressed against the wall, easily held there by one arm. "Do you understand me?"

For some reason Barry was laughing. Actually laughing. Clark released him, and he dropped to the pavement, coughing. A quick glance around showed him no one else in the parking lot, which was a fortunate thing—Clark hadn't stopped to check his surroundings, but had let his rage impel him forward. Bruce would have something to say about that. 

Barry was continuing to laugh, a soft broken sound. "Some reason you think this is _funny?"_ Clark said. 

"Iris left me," he said. Clark blinked at him. And at the same time he placed the strange smell coming off Barry, the slight sour tang of alcohol. Barry was drunk, or had been recently. 

" _Left_ you," Clark said. He could almost not make it make sense. Leave Barry? Who would. . .? And he and Iris had always. . . "When?" he said, because he couldn't ask any of the questions he wanted to.

"Three weeks ago," Barry said. "It's not her fault. She didn't have a choice."

"People always have a choice," he said. It was just what he remembered his mother saying, years before, when some friends of theirs had split up. He knew how stupid it sounded as he said it. Maybe Bruce had a point, about those platitudes.

"Really," Barry was saying. "Do they."

"Our life. . . it's not an easy one. I know in the past, Iris has. . . struggled with that aspect of your life, with sharing you not just with your job but your other job, and with all of us. Sometimes the pressure can just get to be too much, and if—"

"It wasn't that," Barry said miserably. "She wouldn't have left for that. Don't blame her. She's the best person I've ever known. I'm the one that's wrong, I'm the one that's sick, that's fucked up."

"What are you talking about, you're not fucked up. You're kind, and loving, and compassionate, and—and smart, and dedicated, and whatever's wrong I'm sure that—"

"She found me in bed with a guy."

Clark stood in silence, absorbing that. "Well," he said, and, "huh. Um."

"Yeah."

"Well," Clark said again.

"So don't go hating on Iris."

"I. . . wasn't. That wasn't what I meant." He put a hand on Barry's shoulder. The man's head was still bowed. Clark squeezed his shoulder.

"So I've failed the two people I care about most in the world," Barry said, hollowly. "Because of all this with Iris, I haven't been there for Hal right when he needed me most, and I've blamed Bruce for that when it was no one's fault but mine. And then today—Jesus Christ, what did I do." He put his head in his hands. 

"You acted like a human. A fallible human, who makes mistakes. Who gets up, and tries again. Like a good man, who knows when he needs to do better. That's what you acted like." 

Barry looked up at him. He was shocked to see Barry's eyes wet with tears. Barry had always seemed. . . so calm, so steady, so rock-like. Even if the world was falling apart, Barry could be counted on to stand strong. To see him like this was. . . unsettling, in some way Clark could not express. What had happened to the foundations of the world in the last few weeks?

Clark leaned against the hot brick wall with him, and didn't say any more. He had no fund of wisdom to share, nothing other than his presence to offer. At least Barry's weirdness about Hal's sexuality was. . . well, a little more explicable. "You're not fucked up," he said. "You're not sick, there's nothing wrong with you."

Barry snorted at that, and shook his head. "I know it can feel like that," Clark began.

"What you know about it, is zero," Barry said, and Clark didn't bother to contradict him, because it wasn't the time or the place. 

And that was how he had missed Hal's actual sentencing: standing in a hot parking lot with Barry. Bruce had been angry about that, that he hadn't been there, and probing about what Barry had said to Hal, but Clark hadn't told him. He guarded Bruce's private business, when he had to, so he figured he could at least give Barry the same. Barry would tell other people if and when he wanted to; for now, he just needed a friend.

Funny how much of that he had learned from Bruce. He was almost positive people looked at his friendship with Bruce and thought, oh how nice, Batman must be learning how to have human emotions from nice, sensitive Superman. But it wasn't like that at all. He had learned far more about how to be a friend from Bruce than Bruce had ever learned from him. It used to be that he had thought being a friend meant fixing everything—always saying the right thing, coming up with the right solution, knowing what to do. If a friend was in trouble, he had wanted to find just the right combination of words to make everything all better. It was Bruce who had shown him that often a shared and silent presence was the best comfort of all, and that sometimes, just being in someone's space with them was a better fix than all the articulate speeches in the world. 

Loyalty—that was another thing he had learned from Bruce. The sort of loyalty that didn't care what anyone else said or thought, but that trusted beyond all reason, hoped beyond all proof. He had felt that kind of loyalty from Bruce, many times over through the years, and he saw it every time someone dear to Bruce was threatened. If someone he cared about was under attack, Bruce would stand with them, no questions asked. If the whole world stood on one side of a line, and his friend stood on the other, Bruce would stand with his friend, right or wrong. It was from Bruce he had learned that sometimes, nuance was overrated. 

He saw it now with Hal, and was as glad for Hal's sake as he was apprehensive for Bruce's. Because Bruce would never reckon the cost, once he had decided where his loyalty lay, and that was a hard thing to watch. Bruce would paddle over the waterfall with you—and nine times out of ten, he would have shot a grappling wire to a nearby tree, but what about the tenth time? 

There were times when he felt like he was watching that tenth time happen right in front of him, and he could do nothing.

They were at a League meeting, a tense one. Feelings were running high, and Arthur was close to coming to blows with Diana. Arthur spoke in Atlantean sovereignty, and Diana answered in the autonomy of women, and neither was persuading the other, and the stakes of a diplomatic mistake were becoming clear—and to call it what it was, _another_ diplomatic mistake, one that might pit Themyscira against Atlantis at terrible cost. And in the middle of this, when the whole table was casting surreptitious glances Bruce's direction, wondering why he said nothing when he was the only one both Arthur and Diana would willingly have listened to—at that exact moment, Bruce had risen, said, "Excuse me," and walked quickly from the room. 

Clark had tried his best to calm tempers, but had adjourned the meeting rather than let the situation escalate. He had followed Bruce, and found him in an unused conference room, cowl pulled off, cell phone to his ear. He was leaning against a support by one of the windows. "Oh yeah?" he was saying, and Clark heard his soft laugh. 

Then Bruce was quiet, and laughed again. "Well, tell Sol I'll send him some socks too. No. Well, possibly. Depending on what you think of his use of mythology, sure." Another pause. "I think anti-feminist is a bit harsh. Find me a sixth-century feminist, is what I'd say. Who isn't related to Diana." Another soft laugh. "I'll be sure to tell her you said so. No, nothing important, I'm good. Unfortunately, yes. Do you—"

A long pause, and then a sigh. "Yeah, I heard. Talk to you later." 

He slipped his phone back into his belt, and turned to face Clark. "That was an important meeting," Clark said.

"That was an important call."

"I see. I wasn't aware you could receive cell signals on the Watchtower."

"I did some re-configuring. Was there something you wanted?"

"How is he?"

Bruce's face was wary. "I won't discuss Hal with you."

"You—what? Since when?"

"Since you're standing there like a disapproving mother hen, angry because I left your pointless meeting in order to talk to him."

"I'm not disapproving, and that meeting was not pointless. But I guess it was more important for you to talk about. . . socks, or something, rather than avert a potential war between two of the most powerful forces on the face of the planet."

Bruce was studying him with narrowed gaze. He pulled the cowl back up. He strode to the door, brushing past Clark. "Bruce," he said, and Bruce actually stopped, though he didn't look back at him. "It was. . . a shitty thing to say. I'm sorry."

Bruce just grunted, which was all the acknowledgement he was going to get, or that he deserved, frankly. "Can I walk with you to the zeta platform? I was really going to ask how the investigation is going, and if you're making any headway locating Amber Jordan."

Bruce stopped an inch from his face, and gave him glare for glare. "We'll talk about it later."

He kept walking, cape still snapping behind him, and Clark saw in his quick step that he was not invited to follow. He sighed. Friendship, loyalty. . . forgiveness, not quite so much. 

It was a work in progress.

* * *

He stared at the screen for the thousandth time, reviewing the information he already knew.

Amber Jordan's trail had gone cold, and he was left staring at the wall she had disappeared behind like a confused bloodhound. It was not a familiar sensation. That this woman could have disappeared off the face of the earth was unthinkable. Even with five million in cash—hell, even with ten million, Batman should have been able to find her. He could find the needle of Ra's Al-Ghul in the planetary haystack, so why could he not find this one, single, not-overly-bright, clearly untrained woman?

Because she was being hidden, and by professionals. He leaned his hand on his gauntlet and stared again at the map tracking her last known movements. There was a quiet step behind him, intended to alert him to a presence he had been aware of ten minutes ago. 

"Still no luck, huh." Jason crouched on a crate behind him, and Bruce heard the slick sound of the knife being unsheathed, scraped against his boot heel.

"I have a theory," Bruce said.

"I bet you do. I wonder if your theory is the same as my theory."

"My theory is, Amber Jordan did more than just take meth. If you look at how erratic her bank account records are in the last ten years, I think it's entirely possible—probable, even—that she was dealing as well."

"Any thoughts about what she was dealing?"

"No," he said, contemplating. "Not from her records. But from how well she is hidden, I'm guessing a cartel with the power and ability to disappear someone."

"Or they offed her once they were done using her to get to the Green Lantern."

"Possibly. But a murder is hard to hide. It leaves traces, like a phosphorescent trail. The erasure of a person is more difficult to conceal than you might think."

"Wouldn't know, I've never tried to hide any of my murders."

Bruce spun in his chair at that one, and fixed him with a level look. "Is seventy percent of what you say calculated to anger me?"

"More like eighty. So, okay." And he hopped down from his perch, landing with a studied inelegance. "Here's the theory, right? Amber gets drunk, or high, or whatever, and she runs her mouth to the wrong person about how her son is secretly a very important person, and wouldn't they like to know who, blah blah blah. And pretty soon the word is out on whatever streets she's running on, that she has an in with the Green Lantern. I mean, the identity of the Green Lantern, that's salable intel, right?"

"Presumably." 

"And it's likely that—" Jason stopped. He glanced at Bruce, and Bruce saw the flicker of uncertainty on the handsome face. "Shit," he said.

"What."

"Do you think. . . do you think it's at all possible that you were the mark from the beginning?"

Bruce considered. "No," he said. "Though it's a reasonable question to ask. I think it's a more probable scenario that Amber Jordan really was acting on her own hook, when she attempted to blackmail her son."

"What a piece of shit," Jason said. "I mean, take it from me, I know from shitty parents, and what an ever-living piece of shit."

Bruce stared fixedly at the map. "I didn't mean _you_ ," Jason said. "For fuck's sake. You seriously thought I meant you."

"No," Bruce lied. "As I was saying, it's more likely that Amber returned home with the money, and that she failed to keep a low profile. She gets in touch with Buck, or Buck gets in touch with her, and the word goes out that there's serious money being handed out." _Chumming the waters_ , Hal had called it. 

"And that's when her drug-dealing former employers reach out and re-connect."

"Correct. The likelihood is, based on these bank records, that her period of employment with them did not end well. Most probably she ended by owing them serious money, and so they came looking to collect."

"So they off her and take the cash. And maybe they send an operative to chase down Buck as well, and take care of him too, just to tie up loose ends or anyone that can connect them to Amber."

"Maybe," Bruce said. "Possibly."

"Probably," Jason corrected. "None of which helps Hal, because even if you could tie all this together, no prosecutor is going to give a shit about your elaborate and ultimately unprovable theory, unless you drag a couple of conveniently confessing drug dealers into their office."

"Agreed."

Jason pulled up a chair and sat beside him at the monitors. He straddled it, backwards. "You know what you need," he said, "is a fresh pair of eyes. Someone looking at this data other than you. Who knows, I might see something you haven't. I don't know if I mentioned this, but in my callow youth I was trained by a famous investigator."

"Really. Well, maybe I should look him up."

"You know what else you need, is some sleep. Go on, go lie down. Take the cot if you want, just close your eyes for a little bit. I'll take over. You're not going to be any good to Hal if you don't get some rest at some point."

He looked at Jason hesitantly. Jason rolled his eyes. "Yes, Bruce, the minute you leave me alone in the cave I'm going to crank the Led Zeppelin and do naked wheelies off the T Rex while wearing ye olde green panties. Jesus Christ, will you have a little faith."

Bruce rose, trying to hide his stiffness. It had been too many hours in front of the screen, and Jason was right, at this point his brain was running in circles. He shed the suit as he went, peeling off enough layers to be comfortable for sleep, and tipped over onto the cot in the cave's darkest corner. He was asleep before he had taken his second breath, and at some point Alfred must have come downstairs and covered him with a blanket. But it was strange, because he thought the person tucking the blanket around him had a dark silver-streaked shock of hair, and there was a hand that stroked his head, gently. Almost definitely a hallucination.

He woke knowing that it was Saturday, and panicked about the time. Had he overslept? There was a scrawled note taped to the largest pile of his suit on the floor: _Let you sleep. Had some thoughts, call me later on. J._

"Damn," he muttered, glancing at his watch. Barely time to shower and hit the road if he expected to make visitation. He stripped the rest of his clothes as he stumbled to the showers, and used as little hot water as possible, to keep himself awake. He ought to have Alfred drive him, just this once, but he wouldn't do that to Alfred, and it felt disrespectful to Hal, as well.

Standing in the shower spray, he remembered last week, and the disaster that visit had been. "I'd like to come up, if you're going this weekend," Oliver had said to him, and Bruce had had no choice but to tell him of course. Hal could have two visitors at a time, so there was no reason Oliver couldn't come. So that had been three hours in a car with Oliver, who did not believe in silences. And then that had been fifteen constrained minutes sitting at a table with the two of them, Oliver chattering nervously and leaving Bruce no room to speak as the seconds ticked by, and it would be another week before he could see Hal again. And then at the end Oliver had seized Hal into a massive backslapping hug, and there had been no time left for Bruce to say good-bye, other than with his eyes as Hal was being escorted from the room, and his gut had felt like it was bleeding out.

In the car on the way back, Oliver had had the audacity to ask him why he was so quiet. _Because I'm looking for a place to dump your body_ , was what he wanted to say.

Now Dinah was making noises about wanting to come too. What he ought to do was just let the two of them take a weekend slot together—that was what made sense. He ought to call them up and see if they wanted to do that today. If he were less selfish, he would do that. He would ask Hal today if that was what he would like to do. 

His drive upstate was quiet, and he had found a calm center before he walked in, which was the only way to survive it. He couldn't bring papers or anything like that into the visitation room, but he had it all memorized anyway, and he ran through what he had so far in a low voice with Hal—not shying away from the roadblocks in the investigation, sharing Jason's theory, laying it all out for him. It was always possible Hal would have some new leads, would remember an old connection he could follow. But today Hal listened with dead, remote eyes, and it was clear nothing Bruce said was reaching him. 

"There's something I need to tell you," Hal said, when Bruce was finished, and a silence had fallen. "The thing is, I don't give a shit."

"Yes, I can see that."

"I mean it, Bruce. Seriously, what the hell are you doing? Do you somehow think you are accomplishing anything other than making yourself feel better?"

"Every step we can take, however small—"

"Gets you where, exactly? Come on, engage with reality here. It's been six months. It's too late. There's no more trail to follow. You've done everything you could, and it came up snake eyes. So just. . . stop, all right? I mean, what the hell is your deal—did you decide to go off those meds, or something?"

Bruce was silent. It was an unexpectedly cruel remark, and he dropped his eyes. "Look," Hal said. "We need to talk about the actual plan, not the fantasy plan in your head."

"And what would this actual plan be," Bruce said in a slow voice.

"The one where you acknowledge that this is where I live, and stop coming up here every goddamn Saturday. Because seriously, Bruce, what is the plan? You do this for the next twenty years, if necessary?"

"Yes," he said, because he saw no point in lying.

"Why? What the fuck for? Because we had some completely boring, borderline terrible sex one time? I'm sorry, was that some kind of earth-shattering event for you?"

"Yes," he said again. 

"Well that—" Hal stuttered to a stop. He watched Hal's hands clench and unclench on the table. 

"But I'm not here because we had sex," Bruce said. "I'm here because I'm your friend."

"When were we ever that," Hal said. "I'm pretty sure we were never that. Look, it's just—too much, all right? Go obsess over something else for a while. I'm sure someone else will give you an orgasm at some point, and then you can do your whole freaky-obsessive bipolar thing with them. I am not your boyfriend in a coma, I am not your long lost best friend, and I am not your goddamn therapist. Go find another puzzle to solve, go carve a hole in a Rubik's Cube and stick your dick in that. Until then, just—just give me a break, all right?"

He pushed back from the table and walked to the glass enclosure, fists still clenched. He stood beside the guard to wait. He didn't look back, didn't so much as glance Bruce's direction. After a few minutes Bruce got up too, and made his careful way to the door.


	9. Chapter 9

In the dark, he heard the creak of Sol's mattress. "Hey Fly," said the soft voice. "Fly. You okay?"

"Yeah," he answered, trying to sound normal. But there was still the soft whump of Sol's feet hitting the floor, and his shuffle over to Hal's side.

"Raise your right leg," Sol said.

"What the fuck's the matter with you."

"Raise it," Sol said, slapping at his knee.

"I am not going to raise my right leg, what the hell are you on?"

"'Cause you lying over here, looking all curled up like my niece did when she got appendicitis. That's how you can tell if it's appendicitis or not, is if it gets better when you raise your right leg. Go on, give it a try." Sol sat on his bed, his bulk shifting and squeaking the metal frame.

"Sol. I don't have appendicitis, I swear to you."

"You sure? You ever had yours out? It'd be pretty sweet, a hospital stay and everything. They can't do surgery here, they have to send you to the county hospital, and they got real food there. You looking too thin, Fly."

"Pretty sure you don't get to eat the good stuff when you've had abdominal surgery."

"Naw man, but you can send it back here for me." Sol's face widened into a grin he could see in the dark. "'Sides, I know something's up. You over here looking like somebody done run over your dog, and you ain't eat a thing at dinner. Liver and onions, man. You can't go turning that shit down, that's like once a month we get liver and onions."

"I hate liver," he said. And then, because he saw Sol was not going to be distracted, or get off his bed and leave him alone unless he said something: "It was just. . . a shitty day."

"You had a visitor though, right? How shitty can a day be, when you got a visitor? I ain't had one of those in years. Don't go moaning about how shitty your day is when you got a visitor."

Hal turned his head to the wall. Maybe Sol was right. Sol was right about most things. Maybe it was appendicitis. That would explain the wrenching pain in his gut, and the certain knowledge that he was going to puke at any minute. "It's your cousin," Sol said. "Ain't it. You two had you a fight. Man, what I tell you about that."

Hal shut his eyes. "You don't understand," he said. "I had to. He can't—he can't keep coming up here. He's got to have his own life."

"Shit," Sol sighed. "I hear that. You did the right thing."

If he could just stop seeing Bruce's face. He had reached for every cruel word he could think of, thrust in every knife he could find—and Bruce had just sat there, looking at him. Bruce would go into the next nineteen years and six months thinking that was what he had thought of him, when all this while—Hal rolled over and clutched at his stomach. 

A heavy hand landed on his back. "'S okay man," Sol whispered. "We gonna make it. Man, I wish I had had a cousin like that. My cousin, he used to beat the shit out of me when we was little. Once he made me eat the cat food, and it had been sitting out all day. One of them ones in the can too, all wet and shit, smelling like fish. I can't never eat shrimp, not after that. My cousin sucked."

Hal started laughing. He couldn't help it. Sol slapped his back, hard. "Shut up, man, that was a beautiful story."

There was the slow scuffling walk of a booted foot, and Sol was back in his bed in four seconds, long before the guard made it to their cell. Hal had his eyes shut, but he heard the steps slow, then stop. 

"Yo, Top Gun," the gravelly voice said. He ignored it. There was a soft laugh. "I know you're awake. How come you didn't eat your dinner tonight?"

He held himself still. There was the sound of a zipper. Predictable. Then the acrid splatter on the concrete floor on his side of the cell, that seemed to go on forever. "That's better," the voice said. "Clean it up, Top Gun. That better be gone by morning or you'll get cited. The both of you."

He heard the sound of the zip, and then the slow step, continuing its night-shift round. The reek of piss was overwhelming. "Goddammit," Hal sighed, his voice quieter now. "What the hell is that asshole's problem with me?"

"Don't even worry about it," came Sol's soft voice. "T-Bone hates you 'cause you're white. Ain't nothing you got to worry about."

"That makes no fucking sense. _He's_ white, for fuck's sake."

"Man, there are some things you really don't get. You been here six months, and you're still working this out? Every white guy in here reminds T-Bone he ain't better than all the black guys in here. It's like you betrayed his race, or some shit like that. Like you was white, so you ought to know better."

"Great. Racists in prison, who would have guessed." He swung his legs over and reached for his towel. It was two more days to clean towel, which meant if he used this to clean up T-Bone's piss it was two days of no towel after showering, and two days of keeping the filthy towel stuffed under his bed until laundry pick-up. 

"You know what you need," Sol whispered as he mopped up the mess. "You need to join you a gang. Get with one of them white gangs, like they been asking you to, and T-Bone would leave you alone, I bet."

"Oh, I don't know," Hal said. "There would probably be regular meetings or some shit like that. I'm overscheduled as it is."

"You laughing. But gangs ain't all bad. They can protect you, look out for you. 'Course, there's the negative economic impact of gangs to be considered, what with narcotic prevention programs, probation expenses, all that kinda shit, but you already costing the state money being in prison. You ain't never been in a gang before?"

He bundled the wet towel in his laundry sack, trying to cover it with his other things to kill the smell. "Maybe," he said. "I guess you could say I was. A very strange, dysfunctional gang."

"White?"

"Oh, we took all kinds."

"But not Jews, right? I hate me some Jews."

"You are fucking kidding me."

Sol laughed, a low soft sound in the dark. "Aw man, I'm just fucking with you. I'm part Jewish myself. Well, sorta. My step-grandma was Jewish, and that lady was cool. She's how come my last name's Solomon. She took me to synagogue with her, made me wear the little beanie. I rocked that beanie, man. But I got Jesus, so I'm good."

"You know Jesus was Jewish."

"Shut your mouth, Jesus was black. I know because my other grandma had a picture of black Jesus in her Bible, and that was some scary shit. He had a afro and these freaky-ass blue eyes. Like seriously blue, like Superman blue. Like in what world does Jesus have blue eyes? You tell me that."

Hal stretched back on his bed, gone quiet at the mention of Clark. He wondered what they all thought of him, everyone in the League, and what they were doing. He hadn't heard anything from Barry in over six weeks, and that had only been one letter that had said nothing, really. He wondered what Bruce was doing at this exact—no. He shut down that line of thought. He couldn't afford to think about Bruce. Bruce was a slow bleed in his belly. He rolled over and curled his arms around himself and tried to sleep past the ache. Sol was still talking, a quiet rumble of sound, at least until T-Bone came around again. Hal slipped into the gray shadowed world of sleep, the only place where he could be erased.

* * *

Breakfast was his favorite meal of the day, and not just because how on earth could you fuck up breakfast. It was also that the day's accumulated tensions and enmities hadn't had a chance to build yet, and everyone pretty much left everyone else alone. Even the guards did not in general feel like messing with you at breakfast. Breakfast was understood to be a kind of neutral zone, which was why he wasn't paying attention when he ought to have been. 

"Top Gun!" T-Bone was standing at the end of the line, where a guard was always stationed, and he was grinning. Bad news: if T-Bone was at breakfast, it meant he was pulling a double shift, after last night. It meant he was overtired, and the guards got rough when they were overtired. Double shifts were when bad things happened. So he kept his eyes down and on his tray, as he moved through the line.

"I said your name, boy, ain't you heard me?" 

Hal looked at him then, hoping the glance would be enough. T-Bone started laughing. At the end of the line, T-Bone was waiting for him. "Just keep moving," Sol muttered behind him. 

"That's right," T-Bone said. "You just keep listening to your little nigger boyfriend."

"Who's he talking about," Sol said. "You ain't stepping out on me?"

"Baby, you know there's only you," Hal said. He reached for a carton of orange juice, which he shouldn't have done. It was just, they didn't get orange juice every day. Orange juice was only on Sundays, and dammit, he liked orange juice. First mistake: he reached for the OJ in front of T-Bone.

"Nuh uh," he said. "Your cell's a mess. You failed inspection this morning. You don't get no OJ."

"For fuck's sake," Hal muttered. He heard Sol's snort beside him, but that was the difference between them: even knowing T-Bone's dislike, Hal could get away with the under-the-breath obscenity, and a black inmate could not. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sol reach for a carton of OJ, and knew it was for him. Sol never drank OJ; there was some story about a stepbrother forcing him to drink rancid OJ or something like that. Sol had multiple lingering food traumas. Quick as lightning, T-Bone's stick had cracked down on Sol's wrist. 

Second mistake: Hal reacted. It had been the sound of the nightstick making contact with Sol's bone. It was combat instinct, and he couldn't help it, couldn't stop it. He had grabbed T-Bone's wrist before he was even aware he had moved. He had been in fights in his first few days here at Watson, but those had been with other inmates. Somehow, the word had spread that he was ex-military, and that had drawn them like flies, eager to prove themselves against him, eager to take him down. And then, he had made the mistake of revealing he had flown fighter planes, which had led to the unfortunate Top Gun, though he didn't mind Fly (for Flyboy) quite as much. Everyone had a name, and his was no worse than anyone else's. Names were a good thing; they said you had a place, a niche in the community. That niche had been won as much with his fists as anything else, and people mostly stayed clear of him now. 

But that was a wholly different thing from attacking a guard. 

Third mistake: he stopped when he realized what he had done, and for a split second thought maybe he could find a way to fix it. That pause gave T-Bone the opening he was looking for, and the nightstick came crashing down on Hal's skull. 

"You fucker," he spat, and lunged. He shoved T-Bone against the freezer behind him. He felt him fumble for the taser in his belt, but Hal had his arm twisted before he could even close his fingers on it. 

Hal had him on the ground in three satisfying moves, and he was only dimly aware that the dining hall was filled not with whoops and calls and cheers like it normally was during a fight, but a kind of deathly stillness. He saw faces, open-mouthed. He heard Sol's voice, as if from a distance. And then there were others rushing at him, more guards, and he was fighting them all, he could take them all. He would have too, except a wall of electric pain shot down his spine and his knees collapsed and he knew only blackness.

* * *

He woke to chill: something cold against his back.

It was a wall, but not his wall.

A cell, but not his cell.

Not a cell at all, really. Maybe five square feet, chopped into a triangular space. A bench, a filthy toilet, a sink. No way out that he could see, until his eyes focused on the door painted the color of the rest of the walls. A window at the top of the door, but that was painted over too. 

"Welcome to solitary, asshole," said a voice beside his head, and then he saw T-Bone, leaning down. "You belong to me now." 

A fist crashed into his skull again, and his face ricocheted off the toilet.

* * *

"You can use actual plates, you know," Barbara said. "The world will not come to an end if you have to run the dishwasher."

Her father sighed, and bent to find a place in the fridge for the leftover manicotti. She didn't fool herself he would eat it; she would find it next week when she came over to clean his fridge and cook dinner again, and quietly dispose of it. In the meantime he would eat take-out, and tell her he was enjoying the manicotti.

"It's a waste," he said. "When it's just me here. Do you know how much water a dishwasher uses? And paper plates are fine for everyday."

"Paper plates are depressing." She stuck another dish in the top rack of the dishwasher, and dried her hands. "Honestly, it's the most stereotypically depressing bachelor-type thing you could possibly do, eating off paper plates."

"I am stereotypically depressing."

 _More like depressed_ , she thought, but didn't say. "Fine, eat on your Chinet special if it's that important to you. But at least make an effort to heat up something more—"

Thy froze at the knock on the kitchen door. She glanced at her father, and saw his small instinctive gesture, reassuring himself that his piece was in its back holster. A knock on the kitchen door was not good news. He opened the door to a man with his head bowed, and for a minute her brain did that double-take it always did, when seeing Bruce in disguise. Bruce had a way of erasing himself when he wanted to, of making himself shrink, disappear somehow. You could walk right by him on the street and never know: stocking cap, dirty jacket, scuffed shoes. 

"Bruce," her father said in surprise. He threw open the door, and Bruce shuffled in. He didn't pull off his cap. If he was surprised to see Barbara there, he didn't show it, or even glance at her. She had no way of knowing if this was the first time he had stood in the Gordon family kitchen as Bruce Wayne instead of Batman. He kept his hands in his pockets. 

"What's wrong," her father said. "Is it—is Dick all right, or Damian—"

"They're fine," he said. He was still keeping his eyes down. "Jim. I. . . need a favor."

Of all the words she had expected to hear him say, those were the last. "Sit down," her father said. "We were just about to have some coffee. Whatever favor you need, if I can do it, you know I will."

"That's the thing," he said, and his voice sounded odd somehow, hoarse, like maybe he hadn't talked in a while—or like maybe it wanted to drift into Batman, unconsciously. "I need you to do it, even if you can't."

He was looking at her father now, eyes steady. "How about you tell me what's going on, Bruce," he said.

"You remember the Hal Jordan case."

"The pilot. Yes, I remember. Friend of yours, I do remember that." Her father was leaning against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed, and maybe he saw what was coming. She kept her eyes on Bruce.

"He's at Watson now."

"Yes, I remember reading that too."

"I need you to drive to Watson. I need you to check on him. You're the Gotham City Police Commissioner, and you know the warden. He'll give you access. But I need you to go where I can't."

She saw her father's frown. "Why? Why can't you go visit him?"

"Because something's wrong." Bruce's eyes flicked momentarily to her, then away. "I drove up there this morning, for Saturday visitation. I was turned away at the desk."

"That happens a lot," her father said. "If a prisoner wants somebody taken off their list—"

"That's the thing. They didn't check the list, at first. I said I was there to see Hal Jordan, and I submitted my name at the desk, and the first officer I spoke to said, he's not available for visiting today. When I asked why that was, he left. Another guard came back, with the list this time, and told me I had been taken off the list anyway and couldn't visit him."

"All right," her father said.

"No," Bruce said. "Not all right. Yes, I have reason to believe I have been taken off his visitation list. But that's not what they told me at first. The first officer I spoke to didn't look at my name, he just heard Hal's name. He told me Hal was 'unavailable for visitation' _before_ I had submitted my name." 

Her father's frown deepened. "Unavailable for visitation generally means in solitary," he said.

"Yes, I am aware what it means."

"If a prisoner is in solitary—"

"Listen to me," Bruce said, and for the first time Barbara heard something like desperation in his voice. "I can promise you Hal Jordan did nothing to deserve being in solitary. I can promise you he is not a danger to anyone. You know what Watson is like as well as I do. You know he's ex-military. You know they'll do anything to break him. Jim. If I had any other option, do you think I would be standing in your kitchen tonight?"

Her father bit his lips, crossed his arms the other direction. He paced to the window and back, scratched at his hair. "Bruce," he said. "For me to poke my head into the warden's business at Watson. . ."

"Hal Jordan is my friend," Bruce said. And then she saw he was looking at her, blue-gray eyes uncomfortably piercing. She nodded.

"Dad," she said. "Bruce is—Hal Jordan is. . . he's my friend too. He's a good man."

"Oh I see," her father said, looking from one to the other of them. "He's some vigilante too, is he? Well, maybe jail is exactly where he belongs. There's a certain point of view that would agree with that."

Bruce was still. "Is that where you think I belong?"

"I didn't say that. I'm just. . . Christ, Bruce, you understand why I can't turn into a one-man vigilante rescue squad, tell me you see that." 

"Hal Jordan is not a vigilante," Bruce said, and his voice was calm, though she saw what that calm cost him. She saw the small clench of muscle in his neck. "He is in fact the furthest thing from a vigilante imaginable. Jim. If I have ever earned your trust, if you have ever—" He paused, and she watched the clench of muscle again.

"Is he in the League?" Her father had stopped his pacing in the middle of the kitchen, and was watching Bruce.

"Are you asking me to hand over his identity?"

"No. Yes. Hell, I don't know. Bruce, if it were anything else—but relations between the city and the Watson administration have not been what you would call ideal, in recent years. They think we interfere too much as it is, and if I show up on Monday morning—"

"I'm not asking you to show up on Monday morning. I'm asking you to show up tonight. I'm asking you to get in the car and drive up there tonight."

"You want me to do _what?_ Bruce, are you out of your ever-living mind? Are you completely—"

" _Please!"_ Bruce shouted, and the room stilled. She froze in shock, and looked at the floor. She had never heard Bruce yell like that, never heard him lose control. Never heard him say please, for that matter.

"Please," he repeated, quietly now. "Jim. I would not ask this thing if I had any other choice. He is my friend, and he is in prison for a crime he did not commit, and I am working to prove that. If you have ever trusted my investigative instinct, trust this: Hal Jordan is an innocent man. I _can_ prove that, and I _will_ prove that, but he needs to be alive for it to do any good, do you understand me? Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me no prisoner at Watson has ever died in solitary? Are you going to tell me that?"

The two of them were staring at each other, and who knew how long they would have stayed like that. She leaned forward and put her hand on her father's arm. She felt the tense of muscle beneath his shirt. "You have to go," she said softly. "Dad. Please trust us."

He looked at her then, just a quick glance, but she read the betrayal in it. She read all the things he didn't say and would never say: _from the minute you threw in your lot with them you went away from me_ , and _you were raised to respect the law, not find a million ways to subvert it_ , and worst of all, _if you had to choose between him or me, we both know who you would choose_.

"All right," he said. "All right. I'll get in the car right now. You," he pointed at Barbara. "Stay here. That goes for you, too," he said to Bruce. "Here is where you trust me. The only way this works is if I show up alone."

"I don't agree," Bruce said.

"Well I don't give a goddamn if you agree or not. That's my condition. Follow me up there and wait at the damn gates if you want, but my car is the only one driving in. Dammit." He scrubbed at his hair again, rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "All right," he sighed. He grabbed for his jacket on its peg by the back door, then turned again to Bruce.

"Out of curiosity," he said. "If I told you that knowing this man's identity was a condition of going up there, would you tell me?"

"Yes. I would trust you with that. You've kept my own identity safe for many years."

"And look where _that's_ got me. All right, let's go."

He shrugged on his jacket and headed out the door. Bruce paused before he followed, and looked at her. "Thank you," he said, just low enough for her to hear. She nodded and watched them go, then headed back to her dishes. It looked like Batgirl was going to need to take Batman's patrol tonight as well.

* * *

"There's a simple way out of here," T-Bone's voice crooned in his ear. There were fingers gripping his hair. "I can tell you the way."

Hal's head rolled in the direction of the voice. "Fuck you," he croaked. 

"That's a good guess," he said. "But nope, that ain't even it. Close, though. See, this cousin that comes to visit you, the one you been writing to. I been reading those letters. That ain't how I talk to my cousin. I know you ain't really giving it up for that fat nigger, I was just having fun. But I can smell the gay on you. I know you know how to do it, so come on over here and suck it. Crawl on your knees and suck it good."

Hal laughed, but it became a cough. "For five cents I'd bite it off," he said. It got him another heavy fist to his face, but his arms were too weak to do more than raise them in half-hearted defense. He didn't remember the last time he had eaten. The world had become only this room. He was never leaving this room. He knew now he would die in it. He summoned his last reserve of strength and lunged, and he heard T-Bone's laugh as he slipped to his knees, the sharp yank on his wrist pulling a groan from him. He was cuffed. The bastard had cuffed him to the bench while he was passed out. Or asleep. He couldn't tell the difference any more.

"You cuffed me," he panted. "You son of a bitch. You cuffed me in solitary. Are you that afraid of me?"

"I ain't afraid of no faggot," T-Bone snarled.

"The nuance of sexual identity is just completely lost on you, isn't it?" 

The fist landed on the other side of his face now, but he no longer cared. He coughed, and tasted blood in the back of his mouth. "You dumb fuck. I could probably suck you and eat a bag of chips at the same time, your dick's so little I could—"

His back arched, and his world whited out in pain, pulsing with his own scream as T-Bone jammed the taser into his testicles. "Shut up, shut up you fucking faggot, fucking fucking—" T-Bone's voice was a choke of sound, and Hal could hear nothing but his own throat's desperate clutch for air, could feel nothing but the pain that swallowed him whole.


	10. Chapter 10

Clark knocked, hesitantly. He waited for a second, then knocked again. When there was no answer, he considered walking away, or texting. But texting had gotten him nowhere in the last few days.

"Barry," he called this time, as he banged on the door. "Barry, come on, I know you're in there." He tried the knob. He could feel the catch of the lock, but not the resistance of a deadbolt, so with a slight turn of his hand, he snapped the doorknob and pushed the door open, slowly. 

Barry's condo was quiet and well-kept. He would have said no one was home, if he hadn't been able to discern Barry's heartbeat in the living room. He was sitting there, his glasses sliding down his nose, lab reports spread on his knees and the coffee table. "So much for locking the door," he said, with a frown at Clark. "I believe you owe me a doorknob."

"Yeah," Clark said. "That would be. . . correct. Sorry."

"Any reason you chose to ignore the universal symbol for 'please leave me alone?'"

"I was worried about you."

Barry's scowl deepened, and he went back to his reports. "Well, I've had work to do. Lots of work."

"Is that so."

"Yes, Clark, that's so." For mild-mannered Barry, his slightly annoyed tone was the equivalent of hurling something across the room. 

"Well, I thought maybe we could get something to eat. You have to eat sometime, right? And it might as well be with somebody else."

Barry pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. "Okay," he said. "This is you checking on me. I get that. I even. . . appreciate that. Really I do. But I'm fine. I don't need checking up on, all right? I'm doing fine. Really."

Clark sat and watched him scribble on his reports for a while. "Your divorce was final this week," he said, quietly.

"Yep," Barry said. "I noticed."

"The first week can be hard."

"Well, Iris has been gone for about six months, so I've had time to get used to the idea."

"Finalizing the divorce is different. It's the point of no return. Up until then, there's a part of you that just thinks well, there's a possibility everything will be okay."

Barry looked at him. "Clark. I can promise you there was no part of me that thought anything would be okay, since I was six."

Clark gave a bleak smile. "I guess that was just me, then. Look, come on, don't be mad. I did come all the way over here. If you want to keep working, we can even do take-out. Just two divorced guys eating terrible food and I don't know, watching a game or something. How bad could it be?"

"If I do that, will you stop calling me and texting me and generally looking at me in League meetings like I might be about to shatter into a million pieces, or burst into tears, or fall to the floor screaming _why God why?"_

"I. . . yes. Probably. Almost definitely."

"That's a resounding maybe, then."

"You've pushed everyone away for six months, Bar," Clark said. "I think I'm allowed to be worried."

"No one else seems to be," he said lightly. 

"No one else really knows what's going on, because you won't let anyone in. Have you. . . talked to Hal at all?"

"Oh, you mean my friend in prison? Sure. I've been telling him all my problems. He doesn't have anything else to think about, right?"

"I see," Clark said. "So. . . it's consideration for Hal that has kept you from talking to him, and not that you're still mad at him for sleeping with Bruce."

He caught the jump of muscle in Barry's jaw, as well as the slight skip of heart rate. "I'm not mad at him," he said. "But I wasn't there when he needed me, and I'm just. . . trying to think how to make things right."

"I've always found that 'I'm sorry' works pretty well."

"Yeah. Well. Like I said, I'm working on it."

Clark didn't press the issue. He sat and let Barry work, and then he got up and rifled through a kitchen drawer, looking for take-out menus. He was unsurprised when he found some ten or fifteen of them. "Chinese, Thai, or Vietnamese?" he called into the other room.

"Do any of those serve pizza?"

"Moe's it is then. I'm going to guess you're an extra-meat kind of guy—Italian sausage, pepperoni, bacon, Canadian ham?"

"Actually, I'm a vegetarian. Has that really never come up?"

"Really?" Clark stuck his head around the kitchen door. "Honestly? How did I not know that?"

"Because I don't make a big deal of it," Barry said. "Something about my heightened metabolism, I guess. Foods that digest more quickly are easier for me. Meat slows me down. Not a vegan, though, so pile on the cheese. Hey Clark."

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for coming over."

Clark gave him a slow grin, and Barry smiled back. "And extra pineapple," he said, and Clark groaned, because pineapple on a pizza, who did something like that.

* * *

For a half-second after he woke, he had no idea where he was. Or rather, he knew exactly where he was: in his bed at home, his sheets tangled around him, the morning sun spilling through the window. He put his arm up to block the sun, so he could roll over and get a few more hours' sleep, but something stopped him. Something sharp and metal on his wrist.

"I'm sorry about the cuffs," Bruce's voice said, "there was no preventing it." It sounded very far away. What was Bruce doing here? And where was here? 

He struggled to open his eyes, worried that it was so hard to do. "Keep your eyes closed," Bruce said. "The swelling is making it hard to open them. You're in Narragansett County Hospital, about forty-five minutes from Watson."

He licked his lips, and there was a styrofoam cup at his mouth. "Drink. You don't need to drink much, and I wouldn't in fact recommend it, since you're on enough meds to make keeping anything down difficult. You're getting IV fluids right now."

He did manage to crack his eyes at that. He was afraid to know what he looked like—a mangled mess, from the feel of it. The cup went away. Bruce's face swam into view. "How did I get here," Hal croaked, alarmed at the thin sound of his voice. 

"Jim Gordon took you here. Or rather, he called the ambulance that took you here." Bruce's face looked grim, but that was always how Bruce's face looked. 

"That. . ." Hal licked his lips again. "I don't understand. I was. . . at Watson."

"Do you remember being in solitary?"

Hal gave a laugh, which he instantly regretted. There was a low stabbing pain in his abdomen. "Yeah," he said. "I remember. I. . . think. How long. . . maybe I don't remember."

"Seven days," Bruce said, and part of the reason he was confused was that Bruce's voice didn't sound like that. It was tight, like barbed wire strung across razorblades, like murder. 

"Okay," Hal said. He was having a hard time staying awake. 

"Go back to sleep," said the voice that wasn't Bruce's. There was something stroking his hair, and he realized the hand had been there the whole time. There was something he had to tell Bruce, something important. He would forget it if he didn't say it. 

"Wait, I remember," he said. "I have to. . . tell you something."

"You have to sleep."

"I said. . . things. I didn't. . . mean them."

The hand paused in its stroking. "I know," he said. 

"I was trying to—"

"Hush," Bruce said, and some of that voice's terrible tension was relaxed. "Please rest. We can talk when you wake up. You've got about twenty-four hours here. Plenty of time."

Twenty-four hours. It was a lifetime of visits. He tried to calculate how many fifteen minute-visits that broke down into. "Ninety-six," he murmured, when he had arrived at it. In a year's time, they would have thirteen total hours together, adding up all their visits, and here he had just been handed twenty-four. In twenty years, that would two hundred and sixty hours. How many days was that?

"Two-sixty," he said. "Two hundred. . . sixty hours. . ."

"Two hundred sixty point eight eight seven five," Bruce said. "I might have worked it out before."

"Freak," he sighed. "Don't want to miss. . . don't let me sleep. . .too long." But it may have been just a mumble instead of words, and he was asleep before the last one was out.

* * *

Clark rolled onto his back and put his hands to his face. 

"Please believe me," he said. "I didn't. . . there was no part of me that planned this."

Barry propped on his elbow. His smile was soft, and slow, and looked like Barry's smile always looked. "Well," he said. "Circumstances are kind of against you here."

"I _know,"_ Clark moaned. "I know this looks bad. But I swear, I only came over here with the intention of seeing if you were doing okay. This was not a 'you're divorced now let me move in on you' kind of thing, I swear it really wasn't."

"Clark. I wasn't objecting." Barry tugged at his hands, moving them away from his face. "Your moral chagrin here is very. . . endearing. But completely unnecessary, I promise."

"Barry." He licked his lips. "I don't. . . normally do this sort of thing."

Something shifted behind Barry's clear eyes. "Right," he said. "I wouldn't want to get the wrong idea about Superman."

"No, I just mean—"

"I know what you mean," Barry said, and he sat up, reaching for his shorts beside the bed.

"No, you don't," Clark said, and he had no compunction using his strength to haul the leaner man back onto the bed with him. For good measure he rolled them so Barry was under him, pinning him. "Okay," he said. "This seems like a good position in which to discuss your sexual issues."

"I don't think we have that kind of time."

Clark brushed a thumb against Barry's hairline. It was funny, he had never slept with anyone blond before. He was. . . astonished at the loveliness of Barry's coloring, the near-transparency of his skin, the thousand-and-one shades of his hair, from honey-brown to sunrise gold. "You're beautiful," he said, wonderingly. 

Barry just blinked at him. "I would say it back," he said. "But you must get people telling you that a lot. And then you would think that I was only saying it because you had said it first."

Clark studied him. Barry winced, and shifted. "You're not the lightest thing in the world," he said.

"Mm," Clark said, not inclined to let him up. "And what I meant before was, I don't have sex with friends, or team members. Or. . . anyone, really. I don't. . . actually have lots of sex. And by lots I mean. . . any."

"Okay," Barry said. "So, since Lois, you've. . ." Slowly Clark shook his head. Barry raised his eyebrows. "Really? Not at all?"

"I'm not the most. . . sexually experienced person in the world. I'm sorry if this wasn't. . .you know. The most. . . well. I mean, I know the general principles, just not—"

"Clark."

"Mm?"

"Stop talking."

Barry rolled them this time, and Clark let him. "Clark," he said again.

"Yeah."

"That was some amazing fucking."

His throat swelled at hearing that word falling casually from Barry's lips. "And I'm thinking," Barry continued. "I'm thinking I might really like to see about round two here. Is that. . . do you think you. . ."

They were so hesitant with each other, so careful. Both terrified the other was going to bolt out the door, run away, laugh. Clark felt Barry's face with trembling fingers, and Barry kissed him gently, and this time when they fucked it was slower. Barry rode him on top, and Clark let himself groan as loud as he needed to, and he could almost not believe the unearthly beauty of Barry flushed with pleasure and riding him with open mouth and swollen cock, muscles straining. He felt Barry edging into his speed there at the end, because the microscopic vibrations shuddered his groin, and he dug fingers into Barry's ass and let his come flood out of him and into Barry's waiting body, and Barry's come was hot on his stomach.

* * *

When he woke again, he was much more clear-headed. He could also open his eyes a little better, though blinking was still moderately painful. This time Bruce was standing by the window, staring out it, and the sky was dark. Bruce was sipping coffee. He panicked. How many of his twenty-four hours had slipped away from him? He tried to sit up, and the handcuffs clinked against the metal frame of the hospital bed. He hit the side button that raised his head, and Bruce turned from the window. 

"You're awake," he said.

"You look like hell."

"Well at least I've shaved."

Hal felt his face, and was surprised to find how much beard there was. At least a week's growth, enough to look seriously scruffy. He kind of wished there was a mirror handy, but then he kind of did not. "So we have something to discuss," Bruce said, and he put something on the tray table beside the bed, something that made a very distinctive _thunk_. Hal looked at his Lantern ring.

"You've still got it," he said. "They didn't. . ."

"No," Bruce said. "Not yet."

"Then why are you—what are you doing."

"You know damn well what I'm doing. Put on the ring."

Hal looked at him, studying his eyes. "You know I can't do that," he said slowly.

"We're out of options. You're out of options. You're not going back to Watson. That is what is not on the table. Do you understand that?"

"Do you understand that of the many things Bruce Wayne does control, my life is not among them?"

He watched Bruce grip the bedrails. If the man had been meta, they would have crumpled like bendy straws. As it was, the bed practically trembled. "Listen to me," Bruce said, in what was probably a heroic attempt at not yelling. "This is the end of the line. This is what makes sense. Put on the ring, and get the hell out of here."

"Oh okay, that solves everybody's problem. So, answer me this. What happens to Jim Gordon, if I do that?"

"Jim will be fine. He might—the worst case scenario is, he takes early retirement. There are worse things for his health."

"What happens is, Jim Gordon's life is destroyed. He might even get brought up on charges as an accessory, and that's not even mentioning you. But let's just imagine that that _doesn't_ happen. Let's imagine the best case scenario, which is that Jim Gordon actually keeps his job. And he never trusts you again. He makes it his mission in life to shut you down, and that probably begins with a press conference to reveal Batman's identity, and that's without even trying very hard. So he shuts down you, and Dick, and every member of the Batfamily, maybe beginning with the one he's related to, ever think about that one? Now that's the whole Batfamily I've managed to put out of commission, and I'm just getting started. Still think you want me to put on that ring? How many people are you willing to sacrifice here?"

Bruce was white, trembling almost as much as the bedrails. "None of that," he said. "None of that is worth your life."

"Okay," Hal said. "Let's pretend I agree with that. I put that ring on, and what do you think is going to happen to me? Why the fuck do you think that ring is still sitting there, for one thing? It's sitting there because I _haven't_ tried to put it on, because let me explain to you the dim view the Guardians take of people who try to escape justice on their homeworlds. I might put that ring on, but the Guardians would take it from me. And then where do I go? Your castle in Spain? The one you surrendered when you lost all your money on account of facing criminal conspiracy charges, when you abetted the escape of a violent fugitive?"

"You know damn well there's an alternate option for every scenario you mention. You overpower me, and the guard outside the door. We could make it look believable, we could easily—"

" _No,"_ Hal said, sitting up as much as he could manage. The cuffs dug into his wrist. "I'm telling you _no_ , and goddammit for once in your life you will fucking listen to me. You want to know a thing? I told you once I was trash, that Amber and Buck and every shithead I used to know, they were my people because I was trash. Well I know a thing now that I didn't know then, and I know I'm not. But the only thing that makes me not trash, the _only_ goddamn thing I have to hold onto here, is my _honor_ , and that's not just a word, that's not some abstract fucking idea I can try on or take off like some douchenozzle Princeton philosophy major sitting in his room trying on Tibetan Buddhism between bong hits, do you understand me? I gave my _word_ , and that's—"

The wrenching pain in his groin stabbed at him, and he fell back with a gasp. Bruce moved from the bed to an ice chest on another table, and opened it. He came back with a freshly wrapped cold pack. His hands slid under the sheet and removed the pack Hal hadn't been aware was there, replacing it with the new one. He pressed it gently to Hal's groin. 

"I've read your chart," he said. His voice was calm again, but Hal knew it was just another tactic. "Because you might not be familiar with what's in it, I'll review it for you. Dehydration, to begin with. Malnutrition. I doubt you ate more than once in the last week. Three cracked ribs, along with multiple contusions to the head, neck, chest, and legs, many from a blunt instrument. Severe bruising to the groin and testicles. Do you want me to continue?"

"I get the picture."

"Do you really. Because if you go back there, the same or worse is going to happen to you. If you go back there, they will kill you."

"Then that's what happens," Hal said softly. 

Bruce kicked the bed and strode to the window, then back again. Hal watched him struggle to get control. He stood across the room, looking around like he was trying to figure out what he should hit first. He looked like a crazed Doberman in a roomful of cats. "You," he said. "You cannot ask this of me."

"Fuck it, I just did. Wait, are we feeling sorry for you now? Is that a thing we're doing?"

Bruce sank into the chair beside the bed and gripped the back of his head. Almost Hal did feel sorry for him. Bruce didn't move for a long while. Hal didn't want to ask the time. 

"Please," Hal said eventually. He was a bit afraid Bruce might have had a stroke. "Please, can we just. . . I know how pissed you are, but I have to go back soon, and. . . I don't know, I might not have another chance. . ."

Bruce's hand gripped his, strong and sure. His eyes when he looked at Hal weren't angry, or anything but slightly sad. "Did you really think I was gonna say yes to your plan?" Hal asked.

"I don't know. I admit I was hoping. . . hoping you were a little less like me."

Hal managed a laugh on that one, though it hurt his ribs. "Thought you figured that one out a long time ago. That's why you hated my guts, remember?"

Bruce had turned his hand over and was rubbing his thumb along the palm, like he was studying something. "No," he said. "That's not exactly why."

"I need you with me," Hal said. "If I'm gonna do this. I can't do it without you."

Bruce laced their fingers together. "You won't have to." 

"You won't. . . leave?"

"I thought you figured that one out a long time ago."

They didn't say anything else. They sat in the room and just watched each other, and after a while Hal's eyes started to drift shut, and he jerked awake. Bruce put a hand back on his head to steady him, to tell him it was all right, so eventually he dozed a little. When the guard came back in the room to begin the transfer process to Watson's infirmary, Bruce stood to the side and let them move him to the gurney and wheel him down the hall. Bruce walked beside him, for a little bit, as they were rolling him down the hallway.

"I wasn't actually a philosophy major," he said.

"Well, I was speaking in generalities," Hal said. "What were you then?"

"Economics major, if you want to know."

"For Christ's sake, you assholes are everywhere."

And then he couldn't see Bruce anymore, and they were loading him in the infirmary van in the ambulance dock. He figured he was still there, though, watching.


	11. Chapter 11

"Prowlers," his dad said, glancing nervously at the barn. "I heard 'em. First I thought grain rustlers, on account of the silo's full. But I ain't seen no truck. I think it's just prowlers."

"Got-dammit," T-Bone muttered. "They ain't nobody out there. Can't you just get back in the house and go to bed?"

"What, did I interrupt another hard night at the bar? Maybe if you wasn't drunk so damn much of the time, you could get you your own place instead of freeloading off your ma and me, and taking forty damn minutes to answer the phone when I call to tell you there's prowlers out threatening the livelihood of folks what actually do work for a living, and then you might—"

"I have a job!" T-Bone shouted, slamming his truck door shut. "Goddammit I told you I have a job, and I make good money. You want me to check on the barn or not?"

"Well don't do me no favors," his dad said. "And yeah, you got yourself a job—a job you got yourself suspended from." His father spat a brown stream of tobacco juice. "Who coulda seen that one coming."

T-Bone swore under his breath, and pulled his handgun out of the backseat. He hoped the crazy old man was right, and there were prowlers in the barn. It would be the best goddamn night of his life. He let himself fantasize about what he would do to them, if he did find anybody. Probably local teens, looking for a place to get drunk and make out, up in the hay loft—this was the only real barn for miles, and it was far enough from the house it attracted its fair share of lurkers. Many was the morning he'd found a Colt 45 under a hay bale.

"Come out come out wherever you are," he whispered as he creaked back the barn door. 

The barn was dark. There was only the hot husky breath of the cows, who did seem a little restless. T-Bone pulled the slide on his Glock, and let that sound echo in the barn. Sometimes that was all it took, but if these teenagers were looking to have some fun he would damn well give it to them. He could shoot off their kneecaps while they were still pissing themselves in terror. He hoped they would beg him not to shoot. He was itching to beat the hell out of something, and that would be funny—they could beg him not to shoot, and he could say _okay then, since you asked so nicely_ , and toss his gun aside. Then he could just pound their faces into the planks with his fists. _But I didn't shoot!_ He laughed to himself at the joke. 

In the next instant, the world went upside down. 

He wasn't aware of what happened to his gun, wasn't aware of when he dropped it. He just knew it was no longer in his hand, and he was rocketing up into the air, up and up with nothing beneath his feet, and his body crashed to a halt an inch from the ceiling, and he tried to breathe but there was nothing, no air, only the air under his feet as he kicked and struggled. 

"He—he—help," he whispered, but that was all he had breath for. 

A black fist gripped his chest, and then a monster, a demon, a devil from the pit of hell with dripping fiery jaws was breathing in his face. The demon perched on the rafters. The demon's eyes were white and flat. "Lucas Wilson Thibeaux," the demon said. It knew his name, like demons always did. He said it slow, with a period between each word, like _Lucas. Wilson. Thibeaux_. Like it was tasting his name on its jaws, and the taste revolted her. 

"Puh—please," he managed, afraid even to kick his legs, afraid to move. Dimly he was aware of the piss running down his legs and into his socks. The demon was aware of it too, because it flared its nostrils at the foul odor and laughed softly, its hot breath in his face.

"Don't—don't kill me—plea—please," he choked out. 

"Coward," the demon said. "Your kind always are. Do you fear death?"

"Y—yes," he said, and this time it was a sob. "Please—please put me down."

The monster snorted in his face. "A fall from this height," it said. "It would not kill you, coward. But I can make your landing interesting. I can throw you at the right angle to make of your body anything I will. I can snap your vertebrae at the exact point to ensure you never walk again. An inch higher, and you won't have the use of your arms. Another inch, and you can't move your neck. Which will it be? Where will you land?"

The fist on his chest tightened, and whatever was holding him gave just a fraction, and he opened his mouth to scream, but then something was covering his mouth—not the demon, because the demon only gave a grim smile. It was a hand, like a human hand. He caught a glimpse of something red, unearthly, reptilian. The head shone in the dim light. 

"Shh shhh," hissed the red reptile. "None of that, now."

"Listen to me," the demon said, and with a terrifying lunge he had been swung across to another rafter. He kicked his legs, twisted desperately, but the grip on him was iron. "Listen," it said again. Its monstrous mouth was right in his face. "I am watching you. Every day, every hour. You cannot see me. You have never seen me. But I see you. I see what you do to the helpless. I see you, when you raise your hand to those who cannot resist you. And know this," it said. Now its claw was at his throat, and he gasped for air. 

"Know that each and every prisoner is under my protection. They are mine. Do you understand that?"

"Ye—yes," he gulped. 

"And there is one," it said. Its mouth was at his ear, its hot breath engulfed him, it was going to eat him. He couldn't stop the tears sliding down his face or the tremors of terror, and he tried to remember prayers he used to know, Bible verses, anything that could help him. 

"One," the monster repeated. "One in particular you will not touch. You will stay away from him. You will not so much as look at him. If your eyes touch him, I will know. Hal Jordan is mine. Say it back to me."

"Not—not—touch—Hal—J-Jordan," he managed.

"Good little coward," the demon spat, and released him. He didn't have air for the scream as he fell, his arms windmilling, desperate to catch onto something, anything. The wind left his body in a rush as something slammed into him, and then it was the red reptile thing—it had grabbed him before he hit the ground, it was shooting back up to the rafters with him, throwing him choking and heaving onto the dusty planks. 

"A little warning, maybe," it said, and the demon snorted. Its hoof dug into his chest, pressing hard, so hard. He lacked the strength to resist anymore, couldn't even push the thing off him. Its claws wrapped around his throat, tightened. He thrashed and kicked and tried to sob, to beg, but even that was becoming hard. There was black at the edge of his vision now, as the world went dark. 

"Batman," the reptile said, cocking its head. At least he finally knew its name, the monster that had crawled from its lair in the city to eat him alive. The demon's claws dug deeper.

"Batman," the reptile said again. "Is this a thing we're doing?"

Both claws were around his throat now, and he couldn't move his limbs. There was no more kicking, and almost no more fear. He couldn't remember what air felt like, only the terrible suffocating burn of its absence.

"Because I think you know my vote," the red thing said. "But are you sure you want this? You want it to be tonight, when you cross that line? Just be sure."

The black rim of his vision was closing, and it was rimmed with red now. Snapping shut like a kaleidoscope. In the kaleidoscope was the smell of clean hay after rain, and the slide of a sleek pistol in his hand, and sweet potato casserole on a white tablecloth.

" _Do it,"_ hissed the red beast. "You know you want to. You know he's killed before. You know what he did to Hal. _Do it."_

Like the flip of a switch, he was released. He rolled to the side, wheezing and gasping, clawing at the planks. The filth and rat shit and dust had never smelled so good, so sweet. There was still something heavy resting on his back. "Swear you will remember," growled the demon bat. 

"I swear," he panted. "Oh my fucking God, I swear. I swear to Jesus, I swear, I swear. . ." He couldn't say any more, because the sobs took him. After a few seconds he had the strength to crawl an inch away, and then another inch. He had given up on trying to escape; he just wanted air, air, more air. He collapsed, unable to move any more.

He didn't know how long he was out, or even if he had indeed passed out. It could have been ten minutes, or ten hours. He used his elbows to crawl to the edge of the loft, and he retched downward. His vomit landed with a splat in a cow stall, and he heard the faint moo of protest. His face was a mess of tears and snot and puke. 

"Tomorrow," he whispered. Tomorrow he would go to Ronnie's. Ronnie had a part-interest in the Shell station. Ronnie would remember him. He could pump gas there, maybe. He could do something, anything else. Anything but walk back into that pit of hell where every filthy animal in there had that Satan for its demon father, where he was being watched—watched by all of them, probably, reporting back to the monster himself. He could work for minimum wage at the Save-A-Lot, he didn't give a shit. He would bag groceries all day long, he would sweep the floor at the fucking Dairy Queen, but he was never, never going back to that demon pit.

"Thank you Jesus," he sobbed into the hay dust and rat pellets, "thank you."

* * *

In the car, Jason leaned against the side door and watched Bruce. He offered no comment for the first half hour of their drive. The Batmobile glided low and soundless over the roads, hugging the pavement, invisible to police radar. Which was a good fucking thing, because Bruce was driving like the entire GCPD was on his tail, instead of just a couple of owls and a flattened possum.

"So that was some scary shit," he finally said, just to see if Bruce would say anything. Predictably, he just grunted.

"No I mean it," Jason continued. "Let no one say you're losing your touch or getting old. You've still got it, old man."

Bruce gave him a side-eye and kept driving. His lenses were open, but the cowl was on. Jason had never seen him take the cowl off in the car, actually. He had pulled his own hood up the minute they had gotten in, because that motherfucker was hot. 

"So out of curiosity," Jason said. "Is some fifty percent of the way your moral compass works, find what Jason would do and do the opposite?"

"More like eighty."

Jason laughed at that, out loud. "See, I knew that," he said. "That's why you should be thanking me. I knew if I told you to do it, you would never actually do it. I psyched you out through reverse psychology. Admit it, I just out-Batmanned the Batman."

"I'm not having this conversation."

"And yet somehow we still are. Do you know how many times you did that to me as a kid? Declared the end of a conversation by like, divine fiat, even though I was still talking. That's like the _worst_ thing you could ever possibly do to a kid."

Bruce sighed, and Jason smirked at him. "You're wishing you'd brought Dick, aren't you?"

"Right now, yes."

"But you brought me because I'm way fucking scarier, and you know it."

"Yes. Also, Dick is out of town."

"There it is, there's the Bruce I remember. Can't ever let the second-rater feel too good about himself, can you? Always got to make it clear who's first choice."

"For God's sake, when we get home, the two of you can fight about who has the bigger room, and I'll buy you both a pony. Is there any chance you're going to join the adult world sometime this century?"

Jason laughed again. "Never, old man. Seriously, I meant it about before. That was some impressive shit going on back there. Even I thought you were really gonna lose control, and I'm pretty sure that shitstain is going to need dialysis—his kidneys were practically pissing blood by the end there. I wish I'd had a recording of it."

"What did you say?"

"I said that fucker was going to need dialysis, because his—"

He clutched at the side of the car as Bruce cut so sharply to the shoulder that he hit the door. He slammed back into his seat as Bruce hit the brakes. "Nice driving, what the _hell_ —" 

"Say what you just said."

"I said. . . that was some seriously scary shit, and I was impressed, and I wish I'd had a recording of it."

Bruce was looking at him like he had just rattled off all the base pairs of the human genome. "Idiot," he said.

"Used to be you didn't need to stop the car to insult me."

"Not you," he said shortly. "Me. Of all the things not to have remembered. You're right, I am getting old." He looked at Jason like he might be noticing him for the first time tonight, and Jason wouldn't have put it past him for that to be true. "Thank you," he said.

"Ahh. . . sure, no problem. And since we've stopped, any chance I can get out to take a leak?"

"No time," Bruce said, whipping the Batmobile back onto the road, and doubling the speed that had been death-defying enough before. "You'll have to hold it."

"Are you— _what?_ Are you fucking serious right now? Did we forget the part where I am a grown man who gets to decide when he takes a leak? Goddammit old man, I am going to blast a hole in the side of this car with a 480 Ruger if you don't stop this damn car right fucking—"

Bruce reached into the cupholder and handed him an empty travel mug. 

"Such a cunt hole," Jason sighed, settling back into his seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear faithful readers: I have ben caught short by a writing deadline of the not-fun (i.e. non-fannish) variety, which means I will have little time for editing this weekend. So please forgive me if the next chapter doesn't arrive till Sunday. I will try not to miss a day here, but circumstances are conspiring against me. Please forgive me. Next chapter Sunday morning at the latest.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter by myteaplease: 
> 
>  
> 
> [Do you want a towel.](http://myteaplease.tumblr.com/post/93937957005/quick-doodle-for-the-purpose-of-relieving-feelings)

"So we got to talk about what happens after my date," Sol said, and Hal winced. 

"Can we not talk about that right now? It just depresses the hell out of me."

"Got to face facts, Fly. In another three months I'm walking out of here a free man. You'll have to break in a whole new roommate. You can have my socks, though."

"Your feet are gigantic, what am I gonna do with your socks." He spoke abstractedly, because he was trying to concentrate on finishing his letter. If he could finish it before dinner, it could go with tomorrow's mail; if not, it would have to wait till the next day, which would probably mean it wouldn't get there until after Saturday.

"Tell your cousin hey for me."

"I always do."

Sol went back to staring at the ceiling, hands folded serenely on his chest. He spent more and more time like this, now that the date of his release was an actual definite thing—staring dreamily into the middle distance, a small smile on his face, seeing a world far from this one. Part of Hal was happy for him, and another part just wanted to bash his face in. It was like a window was opening in the roof, and only Sol could see out it. Sol's departure reminded him that escape was, in fact, possible, when what he needed most was to forget that it was.

 _. . .worst is how I'm coming to resent him for it_ , he wrote. _I mean sure, everyone has small selfish parts of them. But prison magnifies them all. Every unattractive part of you that you think is insignificant or unimportant, prison just sticks under a high-powered grow light. For those of us who weren't actually such nice people going in, it's what you might call a bleak outlook._

"Jordan."

"Yeah." He stared down the guard at the door, the one who had said his name. That was another thing, was how prison beat the deference out of you. When he first came, he had thought that if he was at least polite to the guards, and gave no trouble, the courtesy would be returned. He was no longer such an innocent.

"Claymore wants to see you."

He glanced at Sol, who shrugged. He went back to writing. "I have to finish my letter."

"Claymore said now."

He stared at the guard again, and the guard dropped his eyes. He was young, this one, and nervous. His eyes would skitter away from you, his mouth would twitch like it wanted to smile before he remembered that you weren't supposed to. This kid was either going to get eaten for breakfast, or he was going to turn into one of the more brutal guards in an effort to prove himself. Prison had a way of erasing the best case scenario.

"What the fuck ever," he said, tossing his pen aside. Making the mail was doomed now, just so that Claymore could have his monthly check-in meeting five days early. Probably clearing his schedule so he could take a long weekend at the lake, the fuckhead. There were pictures of him at some sort of lakehouse with his family (not to mention his hot wife) prominently displayed in his office. You had to be a special kind of dick to display those pictures in front of prisoners.

The kid trailed him in the hall, which was unnecessary, but probably made him feel like he was doing his job. At one point, as they passed the TV room, he even put a nervous hand on Hal's arm, like maybe Hal was going to bolt and throw his body at the TV so he could watch fifteen seconds of _Duck Dynasty_. Hal jerked his arm away. "Get your hand off me," he said, and the kid complied. Definitely he was going to get eaten for breakfast.

In Claymore's office, Hal sat with his arms crossed while the deputy warden read through some paperwork. There wasn't anything that important he had to do; it was just what all of them did to avoid the necessity, even the remote possibility, of being courteous to an inmate, or making eye contact. Making you wait while they completed a menial task was just the way things worked. Hal fixed him with an unblinking stare.

"Jordan," he eventually said, frowning at another bit of paperwork. "There's been a change in your status."

 _Fuck no_ , he thought, as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He was careful to keep any sign of it off his face. He was being moved to the maximum security block, because they could, and because it was a petty vengeance no one much would notice. Four months since T-Bone, and they probably figured the oversight committee's eyes were off them.

"You can't fucking do that," he said. "You can't change my status because of that sadistic motherfucker. Come on, I've got—Sol's out of here in twelve weeks, give me a break," he said, taking a shot at conciliatory. 

Claymore glanced at him with remote eyes. "That's not what I meant," he said. "You're being released. This Friday."

"To where?"

Claymore peered over his glasses at him. "Are all you flyboys this dumb? I said you're being released. Notification from the DA's office arrived yesterday morning. You'll have your meeting with an exit counselor on Thursday. If you need help with employment and housing, there are agencies that handle that sort of thing. Now if you don't mind, I've got work to do here."

It was like his brain had broken. It was spinning back and forth, whirring in place. None of the words made sense. "Released," he said. It was like the word had lost meaning. But Claymore's face was impassive, and he was clearly not going to communicate any more than he had to. "I don't. . . yesterday morning? You knew I was scheduled for release yesterday morning, and you wait till now to tell me?"

For some reason that was the fact his brain was snagged on. Claymore just stared at him. "It's been a busy couple of days," was all he said. He went back to his paperwork. Hal sat there, not sure how to move his legs, really. 

"Dinner's in five," said the kid guard from the doorway, and Hal stood, walked, moved in some sort of dream. Kid guard still walked with him, but this time he glanced at him, and he had a shy smile. 

"I thought you might want to hear that," he said. "I mean. . . you know, congratulations."

Hal just looked at him. It was such a strange moment—a small human interaction with the enemy, and he had no idea how to process it. "Thanks," he said numbly. Back in his cell, he sat on the bed and stared at his feet. Sol was still off in happy land over there on his bed. Hal looked at his hands and realized they were shaking. He tried to reach for his letter, but he couldn't arrange words into sentences, even in his head. 

It wasn't a window in the roof. Someone had just ripped off the entire top of the building, and he was cowering under open sky. The light was too bright, the air too sharp. He had forgotten how to breathe.

"You okay, Fly?" Sol had raised his head to look at him suspiciously.

"I think. . . yeah," Hal said. "I just. . . I think actually, I might be. Just. . . maybe." And he started laughing.

"White boys," Sol sighed, and shook his head.

* * *

On Thursday, a package arrived, with no accompanying note. It had clothes inside. Most prisoners were clothed from the donation bin on release, which led to some sorry-looking former inmates in ill-fitting cargo pants and humiliating printed T-shirts, from the few Hal had seen. But he was one of the lucky ones, in this as in so much else: new jeans and a soft shirt, along with new underwear, new socks, and even new shoes—and he got a moment of amusement out of the Hermès  
Black Label silk blend boxer briefs, and Bruce's innocent assumption that that was just what people wore for underwear. He wasn't surprised that the package was all new clothes, since his own were long since donated or thrown away, but he was a little surprised at the labels, since the sizes were all wrong. Or at least, he thought they were wrong, until he tried them on. 

"Holy shit," he said, looking at himself in the clothes he had been convinced were several sizes too small. He wasn't sure what was more embarrassing—that he had lost that much weight, or that Bruce had quietly noticed, and correctly guessed his new size. Well, some time in the gym could build back up his muscle mass; actual food could do the rest. Ten and a half months was not erased in a day, or even a week. It was just a strange feeling, was all, to look in the mirror—really look, for the first time in a long time—and see someone who did not look like him. And it wasn't just his clothes size, or his build: his eyes were too deep-set, the angles in his face too sharp. The man in the mirror was not a handsome man. He looked like the sort of man you might edge away from in the grocery store.

"You're vain, princess," he said to his reflection, and Sol gave a snort.

"Any other revelation you wanna share with the class?" he said.

On Friday, he said his quiet good-byes to the handful of people he cared about, and saved Sol for last. He was swept into a bear hug by Sol, and stayed like that for a minute, his throat clenching shut. "Man, I'm so happy for you. You get out there and get your life back, you hear," Sol whispered, and Sol's generous enjoyment of his good fortune shamed Hal, remembering his jealousy of before. 

And then he was walking out the gates to the parking lot, where he could catch the shuttle to the local bus station. He had to be escorted by a guard, and it was the young one, who had been polite before. "Good luck, sir," he said at the gate, and extended his hand. Hal shook it. "Stay human, kid," he said.

There in the parking lot was a nondescript white Toyota, and leaning against it was Bruce, and his heart stopped. 

He walked up to Bruce and just stood there. Now that it came to it, and he could in fact touch him, he had forgotten how. "I don't. . . have the words for thank you," he said. 

Bruce stood there looking at him, and he looked at Bruce, and if anyone was watching from the windows, it would look bizarre, but that was them. "Nice car," he said.

"I own some regular cars, too," Bruce said, and Hal gave the Toyota a critical glance. 

"So you borrowed it from Clark?"

"Dick," he said. "Go on, get in."

Hal slung his duffel in the back, and climbed in. Every sensation was an adventure; everything was new again. The seat belt sliding across his middle felt exhilarating, the air conditioning was fresh and sharp, the feel of the upholstery under his fingers strange and wonderful. Hal stared out the window as Bruce drove, his eyes almost not able to take it in all the beauty. A mundane stretch of road like any other; last year he would have sped along it, his thoughts elsewhere. Now he focused on every leaf, every blade of grass and stray rock, every shift of light through the branches. It was all so breathtakingly beautiful he couldn't look away. 

"You want to get something to eat?"

He almost jumped at the sound of Bruce's voice, and he realized he had just been huddled here in silence, staring out the window like some freak for half an hour. Bruce probably assumed he had some sort of mental disorder. 

"Yeah," he said, suddenly aware he was intensely, ravenously hungry. 

They pulled over at a truck stop for dinner, just two slightly rough-looking guys in a battered Toyota, and found a table in the back. The menu was a puzzler, because Hal found himself unable to choose—he wanted everything on it. He ordered the Hungry Lumberjack breakfast sampler, with a side stack of waffles, and a barbecue burger with red onions and pepper sauce, as well as a bowl of Brunswick stew for good measure, and he sat there and plowed steadily through it all. 

"Aren't you going to order anything?" he asked Bruce.

"I think maybe I can just graze your leftovers. Actually, I think a small village could graze your leftovers."

"There aren't going to be any leftovers, I can promise you that. And keep your fingers away from my fries."

Bruce just watched him in what he could tell was quiet amusement, or maybe the beginnings of nausea, but Hal didn't care. It was the best food he had ever eaten. His mouth couldn't process enough tastes. For dessert he had an ice cream sandwich from the case by the register, one of the chocolate chip cookie sandwiches with the rubbery cookies filled with nine thousand preservatives, and he wanted to weep at how good it tasted, how extraordinary everything was.

"You kept the beard," Bruce remarked. 

"Yeah," Hal said. "Well, shaving's kind of not fun, in prison. You have to hand over your ID card to get a razor from the commissary, and it's this single-blade Bic, and you can only use it every two days, and it's—it's just more hassle than it's worth, so I gave up. Besides, it's an important addition to my scruffy ex-con look."

There was only one awkward moment, and that was when the check arrived. "Shit," he said, his mouth still full of ice cream sandwich, because he had forgotten about this part. His hand had reached to his wallet before he had remembered he didn't have one. 

Bruce's smile was wry. "I think I got this one," he said, pulling out a card. "You did buy last time."

"Wait a minute," Hal said. "I bought you dinner at Chez Manisse, and I get Flo's Truck Stop and Diesel Café?"

"Known for their pork brains, though," Bruce said. "According to the sign. Surprised you didn't give those a try, too."

As they walked to the car afterward, Bruce reached into his pocket and held something out to him. "Here," he said. "Something that belongs to you. I didn't want to give it to you in the restaurant, for obvious reasons. But I thought you'd want it back, as soon as possible."

"This better be the collector's edition CD of my re-mastered Led Zeppelin II album," he said. His hand closed on the ring, and he looked at it. It felt cold to the touch, as it always did—several degrees colder than Earth metal, and heavier. Something shivered up his spine at the touch of it. 

"They never took it," he said. He had been afraid to ask, afraid to hope.

"They did not." He could tell there was something more to that story lurking behind Bruce's words, but he didn't feel like exploring it just yet. He slipped the ring on its accustomed finger, and he felt it snug to him, adjusting for his weight loss automatically. He took a shuddering breath at the jolt of electricity down his spine. He could detect the faint green glimmer that washed over him, but he doubted anyone else could have, even Bruce. The surge of power took his breath away. 

He looked up to see Bruce's eyes on him. "You want to take the car home, or do you want to get there on your own?" he said, with a glance at the ring.

Hal considered it. "I think I'd. . . better drive," he said. "It's been a while, after all." It was amazing how much easier it was to breathe, with the ring back on his finger. Like a lost part of him restored, like opening up another lung. He felt stronger in all his limbs, or maybe that was just the Lumberjack Special.

"Also this," Bruce said, handing him his cell phone. 

"Right," Hal said. "Well, I'm a little behind on the monthly, so I'm pretty sure Verizon and I have parted ways."

"League members use their phone for League business all the time. It's a business expense, covered by the League. Your bill is current."

"Bruce. I haven't been a member of the League for almost a year now."

"You've been a member."

They got back in the car, and Hal scrolled through his phone as they drove. "You didn't happen to update my facebook, did you? And is. . ." He frowned as he opened up his music. "For the love of. . . What is all this shit? Did you. . . did you just upload the complete works of Wagner into my ipod? A hundred and thirteen works, are you serious? You complete and utter dipshit."

The corner of Bruce's mouth quirked a little bit, and Hal rolled his eyes. "You're eleven, I hope you know that. That's like two hundred hours of memory you just used so people could scream at me in German. And how'd you get my password anyway?"

"Yes, _suckmydick374_ was exceptionally difficult to figure out."

"But the three seven four though."

"Plane number."

Hal rolled his eyes again. " _That's_ where he decides to focus his investigative skills."

They fell into easy silence again, and Hal wished he hadn't said that, about the investigative skills. It seemed to leave the obvious question out there. In truth there were a thousand questions to ask, a thousand conversations to have, and somehow he wanted to have none of them. That was the great thing about Bruce; silence was second nature to him, and of all the strange things he was likely to say, _I think we should talk_ would never be one of them. 

"Pull over," Hal said suddenly, along a deserted stretch of road. The trees were thick along this part of the drive, the evening summer sunlight slanting gold and green through the leaves. Bruce pulled the car onto the gravel shoulder, and Hal got out. "Be right back," he said.

In twenty feet, he was in dense woods. He kept trudging until the trees closed around him with a soft sigh of wind, then struck left. He had glimpsed it, just a flash of reflection off the water as the car went along this curve, and if he went down this bluff—there. At the bottom of the hill, largely screened from the road, was a small stream. It gurgled over rocks, just a few inches deep in spots, and crystal clear. If he could just touch it. He made his careful way down the slope of the little embankment, and slipped off his shoes. He rolled his cuffs. 

The water was colder than he had expected. It must be spring-fed. He waded out to the middle and closed his eyes, spread his toes. It hit him in the gut then, that this was real. Everything—everything was being given back to him, a free gift of the universe, and he wanted to laugh, cry, curl in a ball and shake with joy, shout until the birds flew from the treetops in alarm. He did none of those things. He breathed deep and crouched down so his fingers could touch the water too, and he splashed the achingly cold water on his face, letting it run over his beard. He had never been a particularly religious individual, but the ritual of pouring the water over his head and face felt like baptism, like ablutions before prayers, like cleansing. He left his hands over his face and just crouched there, in the middle of the stream. 

It could have been two minutes or twenty that he stayed there. When he finally put his hands down and opened his eyes, Bruce was standing on the embankment watching him. "I didn't mean to intrude," he said. "But I was. . . concerned."

He laughed. Bruce had probably thought he needed to piss, and when he didn't come back, had worried for the state of his bladder. Or assumed he was off in the woods having a psychotic break of some sort. Well, he wasn't exactly wrong about that. Hal picked his way out of the stream and back up the embankment.

"Come on in, the water's fine," he said. "Sorry I made you worry."

"It's all right. Hal. Do you. . ." Something flickered behind Bruce's guarded eyes. "Do you want a towel," he said, but that hadn't been what he was going to say, it was clear. Hal climbed the next few feet until he was on Bruce's level, eye to eye with him. 

He hadn't touched Bruce all today. Not so much as a brush of his hand against Bruce's.

There were two excellent reasons for that, and Hal considered them both, as he stood there. Reason one: it would be making assumptions that were possibly not true, or were more true on his side than Bruce's. They had had one night together, eleven months ago, and normal people did not re-order their whole emotional lives around one encounter, no matter how amazing it was. Normal people were not in prison, re-playing it over and over in their heads. When things got too bad, that memory was what he had held onto—the only night he had ever had like that, the one night he had ever been that painfully real, in bed. But that could be just him. Bruce had maybe moved on, Bruce maybe didn't see their relationship like that anymore. 

And reason two: if he started touching Bruce, he wouldn't stop. 

So Hal did that thing that Bruce liked to do, the hand on the back of the neck. He put his hand on the back of Bruce's neck, in that same gesture, the request for permission. He felt something. . . shudder, was the word for it, in Bruce's body. Like in his own when he had put on the ring. So maybe it wasn't just him. 

"You don't. . . have to," Bruce said, and the hoarseness of his voice told Hal everything he needed to know, and the last darkened corner of his heart was flooded with sunlight. He pressed his lips to Bruce's, his body against Bruce's, filled his mouth and nose with the smell and taste of Bruce. Bruce was kissing him so hard it was painful against his lips—like literally painful, literally possibly the worst kissing he had ever participated in, because they were basically just eating each others' faces off. Bruce's hands were on either side of his face, Bruce was walking him backwards like maybe there was a couch right behind them and not a six-foot drop to a rocky streambed. 

Bruce had pulled off for a moment, and was examining him, stroking his face with his thumbs. "Interesting," he said.

"That— _interesting?_ Okay, that's—"

"The beard. New experience for me." Then he dove back in, because whatever else he meant, he clearly did not mean a _bad_ new experience. Hal stroked his tongue against Bruce's, dug his fingers into Bruce's waist, pressed his legs against Bruce's. Their kissing was so electric that it was making his bones vibrate, quivering him to his core. Or that was Bruce's phone in his pocket.

"Your phone," he murmured.

"Damn," sighed Bruce. He dug his phone out of his pocket. Hal took the opportunity to assess the bulge in Bruce's pants. "Yeah," he said, into the phone. "Yeah, I've got him. He's fine. He is. Yeah, he's here. We're driving back right now." 

Hal smirked at that, and pressed a hand against that interesting bulge, letting his thumb do a little exploring. Bruce seized his wrist. "No, I—I'm here. All right, I'll ask him." He held the phone to his shoulder. "Oliver and Dinah want to know if you'd like to come over for a late dinner tonight, when you get back to the city."

Hal winced. "He'll let you know about that," Bruce said into the phone. "He's taking a nap right now. I'll ask him when he wakes up." Hal rolled his eyes at that. 

"Well," said Bruce. "I couldn't. . . see that he was napping, before. He's—he's in the back seat." Hal started laughing, trying to be quiet, and Bruce scowled at him, and pressed a foot on his bare toes, hard. "Ah, listen, I'll call you when we get closer, all right? Good. Yes. All right." He clicked off, and Hal let himself laugh aloud.

"How are you so terrible at that? That was embarrassing. I was embarrassed for you."

"Oh, shut up," Bruce said. 

"I'm in the back seat? What am I, your Labrador you're taking to the lake?"

"Well, you're about as wet as one." But Bruce's smile echoed his, and somehow Hal couldn't stop laughing. And then, miracle of miracles, Bruce was laughing too, that low rueful sound he remembered, the most beautiful sound Hal had ever heard, and he put his hand back around Bruce's neck, and Bruce put his around Hal's, and they held their foreheads tipped together like that, and just breathed in each other's space, their fingers digging in. He was never going to let go, never.

"Listen," Bruce said softly. "I want to be in a bed with you."

"I think that is an acceptable goal."

"What I mean is, not here. If we keep making out here, I won't be able to stop."

Hal let himself picture for a minute what Bruce would look like, unable to stop. He added it to his mental list of things he was going to make happen, soon. "Okay," he said. "There's also the other consideration, that if we get naked and start scaring the local wildlife, we could get arrested for indecent exposure. I'd like to make it through the day without re-incarceration."

"We have had a bit of bad luck there," Bruce said. Hal dipped his mouth in for another kiss, and Bruce gave a small moan. Hal kept kissing him.

"We should. . . try to hold it to. . . one joint arrest. . . per decade," he murmured, then Bruce's mouth caught his again, and he could no longer tell if they were kissing or laughing, or where the line was any more—he was drunk on the sunset and the water and the warm sheltering trees, and they had all combined to shoot joy and beauty straight into his heart, and he threw back his head to laugh aloud again, and found warm lips that met his, and arms that cradled him.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter by Evinist:
> 
> [Do not let him into your head](http://evinist.tumblr.com/post/94977620061/no-no-no-no-do-not-let-him-into-your-head).
> 
> [Barry's message](http://evinist.tumblr.com/post/103165022276/a-short-comic-inspired-by-fabula-unicas-wonderful).

Bruce's lie to Ollie and Dinah did not end up being such a lie as all that. Hal did fall asleep in the car, toward the end—either because he was actually exhausted, or because his body had finally given up trying to digest more food than it had eaten in ten months and passed out. He opened his eyes when the car stopped, and in that moment it occurred to him that it had not occurred to him to ask where they had been going all this time, mainly because he had no place to go. 

Well. He had been homeless off and on, when he was growing up, and he could do it again; he'd pulled himself up from shit before. He blinked at the walls of the enormous garage. Bruce's hand brushed his knee.

"You awake?"

"Yeah." He struggled up, reached for his duffel in the back. "Thanks for letting me crash here."

Bruce said nothing. He followed Bruce out the garage door and into the Manor, which was dark and deserted. Everybody out beating up criminals, probably. Bruce tossed the keys on the kitchen counter, and something in that simple gesture made Hal laugh—even in rich people's houses, you still walked in and threw your keys on the counter and grabbed a beer from the fridge like everybody else. Or in the case of Bruce Wayne, a distilled bottle of Italian sparkling water, but still. 

"You thirsty?"

Hal shook his head. He followed Bruce up the back stairs. He'd been in the Manor once, some years ago, but only in the front part of the house. The place was a maze. But he was so tired he didn't care. There were about seventeen hallways and fifty staircases, it seemed like, by the time Bruce pushed back a heavy door and flipped on a light. Hal dropped his duffel and looked around. 

"This is your bedroom," he said.

"Yes. I'm. . . sorry, I made an assumption that was possibly insulting. There are plenty of other bedrooms, if you'd prefer I can show you to—"

"Just show me to your bathroom."

Bruce pointed the way, and Hal flipped on the lights in a vast palatial chamber of marble and shiny chrome. "Holy wow," he muttered. The shower was about the size of the kitchen in his old apartment; it had a bench in it and everything. The sunken jacuzzi tub looked like something out of the Playboy mansion. There was even furniture in here — one of those long stretchy chair thingies in case you got too tired moving from your triple-nozzled shower to your whirlpool bath, and needed a lie-down in between. Another door probably led to the closet, but when he opened it he found something more like a dressing room, with even more comfortable chairs and shelves of gleaming wood. "Christ," he said.

He stood at the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. The lighting was more flattering in here than in the bathroom at Watson, that was for sure, but it didn't do him any more favors. He opened a few immaculately organized drawers until he found what he was looking for, and set to work. When he emerged a few minutes later, Bruce was leaning over a laptop on a side table, typing quickly. He had his glasses on, and he was frowning.

"The famous glasses," Hal said. "Retrieved from the laser refracting device?"

Bruce straightened and peeled off the glasses. His frown deepened as he peered at Hal. "You shaved," he said.

"Yep. Thanks for the loan of the razor."

"You didn't have to do that."

Hal ran a hand over his newly smooth jaw, assessing it. "Well," he said. "I thought it might be. . . a little much for you, yeah. But it wasn't just that." 

He had stood before that gleaming mirror, studying himself before he did it. He had told Bruce earlier it was about the hassle of prison razors, but that was only partially true. He had kept the beard for the four months since his time in solitary as a kind of talisman, a reminder. He had thought that he would die down there, and he had not. He had no memory of being retrieved from the hole they had thrown him in, hoping the world would forget about him; by the time Jim Gordon had got to him, he had long since passed out, and probably would have died, within a few more hours. He had flown plenty of combat missions, survived closer calls than that in space, probably a dozen times or more. But this was the one he had not wanted to forget.

Bruce was closing his laptop. "A little much for me," he repeated. "Hal, I am aware you're a man. I am not going to be put off by reminders of maleness."

"All right then," he said easily, but he was anything but easy. He was alone, in a bedroom, with Bruce, and what had seemed so simple and natural when they were in the woods together was starting to feel like something he couldn't do, and his stupid fucking weirdness was rearing its ugly head. 

"So I. . . I'm actually pretty tired," he said. "I was thinking I should just, you know. . ."

Bruce laced his hand in Hal's. "Just come lie down," he said. "Come sleep. If you want, I can take the sofa."

"You know what's funny about that," Hal said around his suddenly dry throat, "is that most people, when they say that, they mean the sofa in the living room. But you, you've got a sofa right here in your bedroom. You've got like, five other rooms in your bedroom."

"You take the bed, and I'll be over here."

"Don't be ridiculous," he said. "Just. . . can we just lie down together. I want to. . . be near you, I just. . ."

"I know," Bruce said. Hal let himself be led to the bed, and to his relief there was no moment of undressing. Bruce just tugged back the duvet, and they crawled inside, and after a bit of careful adjustment they were lying loosely in each other's arms, all their clothes on, and it was clear Bruce was just going to leave it there. The tenderness of that tore at Hal's chest, that Bruce would hold him so carefully, let himself be led by Hal in this. He considered saying _hey guess what, prison did not actually make me any less freaked out about this kind of thing_ , but Bruce was a detective, after all, and it was not that hard a get. 

Hal ran a hand through Bruce's hair, stroking that thick dark mane. Bruce just echoed his moves, letting himself stroke where Hal stroked, touch where Hal touched. Mainly they just lay there and looked at each other.

Hal scooted closer and propped on his elbow. "Now," he said. "Where were we, before we were so rudely interrupted?"

"Right about here, I think," Bruce said, leaning their foreheads together.

* * *

The night Hal had gone back to Watson from the county hospital had been the night that had come closest to breaking him. 

"He didn't do it," he had said into his phone. "Goddammit. He didn't fucking do it, he went back. Oh goddammit what the fuck do I do."

There had been a strange sound on the other end, like Clark was moving somewhere or putting something away. "Bruce," he said. "Did you honestly think he would?"

"I don't know," he had moaned. "I don't know, I don't fucking know. Oh Jesus God, I can't take it, I'm telling you I can't do this, what the fuck do I do." And he had rested his head against the wall, wanting only to batter his skull into the ugly yellow plaster until he bled. He was in some deserted hallway of the hospital, and it was two in the morning, and Hal had just been loaded into the transport to be taken back to the hellhole where they would surely kill him, and it had broken him, he was done, he couldn't take one more second of the vise wrenching him open from the inside.

"Oh man," Clark had sighed. "I'm so sorry. Christ. Bruce, you knew he was stubborn. He's as stubborn as you. You know he's going to sit there until you can figure out a way to get him released, he's not going to—"

"I failed," Bruce had said. "Everything I've tried, it just turns to shit. A simple murder, I must have solved hundreds but this one, the only one that matters, I can't—I can't even—fuck, tell me what to do, how do I help him, I don't even know what to do here."

There had been a pause, and then an identifiable sound: Clark closing a door. "Listen," he had said. "Do you want me to come up there? I can be there in like a minute and a half, you know I can. You just say the word."

But Clark had closed a door behind him, so someone wouldn't hear this conversation. "You're not alone," Bruce had said. 

"It's fine," Clark said. "I can be there, if you need me."

"No," Bruce said. He took a deep breath, tried to get control. He was ashamed already of his moment of weakness. "It's fine. I'm fine. I'm sorry to have bothered you."

"Bruce, don't say that, please, you didn't bother me, I want to know what's going on. Are they seriously taking him back right now? He doesn't get longer?"

"No. He'll be in the infirmary at Watson for a few more days, maybe a week. God knows when I can see him again. Jesus, Clark, I just—" He had squeezed his eyes shut, willing down another wave of pain. "I go my whole life," he whispered. "My whole life, trying to prevent exactly this, and when it finally happens. . . do you understand what it feels like to breathe in a space apart from him? Because it feels sometimes like I can't even breathe if he's not. . . like I'm being crushed from the inside. . . Jesus, what is happening to me."

"Oh Bruce." Clark's voice had been so sad, so wistful. 

"I don't think I'm going to see him again. They'll kill him, after this. This was my one chance, to convince him, and I failed. I failed like I've been failing at everything, like I've failed him from the beginning."

"Okay," Clark said. "Bruce. You tell me when. You give me the word, just one word, and you know I will get him out of there. I will rip off the roof of that building and get him out of there, you know I will."

"He wouldn't go," Bruce said dully. "His goddamn honor won't let him. Why the fuck did I have to fall in love with someone so fucking honorable."

"Because you would never have settled for anything less, old friend." In the quiet on the other end he heard Clark's sigh. "I'm just. . . so sorry," Clark whispered. "I don't even know what to say. But I'm here. You just tell me what you need, and we'll do that."

"I don't need anything," he had said. "I think we're long past that." He leaned against the wall, and shut his eyes. "I'm sorry," he said again. "Go back to what you were doing. Go back to Barry."

He got some satisfaction from Clark's choke of surprise at that one. "How did you—okay, never mind. I'm not even going to ask. And I wasn't—I mean, I didn't—"

"I'll call you tomorrow," he had said, clicking the phone off. 

He thought of that conversation now: his own despair and self-pity, the bitter tang of them both in his mouth. All the anger of a spoiled child who had finally been given a pony, only to have it taken away. Even then, he thought he had known what love was. He wondered if it would be always like this—looking back months or weeks or days even, and realizing that he had been foolishly deluded, that now he truly knew what it was to love the right way, and his love from yesterday had been paltry, poor, unworthy. 

Hal stirred in his arms. His sleep was light, but maybe it always was. He had no real frame of reference, which was an odd thing to realize. Hal was kicking back the covers, like maybe he was overheated. And then he was sitting up, pulling off his shirt, and collapsing back on his pillow, which happened to be Bruce's chest. "Mmmph," he mumbled, squinting up at his pillow. "Shirt off."

Bruce sat up and pulled his off too, and Hal sighed and burrowed contentedly closer, and no, he had been wrong, his love now was far superior to that of four minutes ago. Hal was scooting a bit closer, and now they were kissing, and Hal's hand was slowly stroking his chest. A thumb grazed his nipple, and his breath hitched, and Hal's eyes were all the way awake now, and alert. Hal's thumb grazed his nipple again, more firmly, and Bruce bit back the groan. Hal raised his head.

"Really," he whispered. Bruce swallowed.

"I—" he said, and then Hal's mouth bent to his nipple and licked, and Bruce gasped and did groan aloud, at that. 

"Now that is some interesting information," Hal said softly. This time when his mouth bent, he suckled, hard. Bruce's gasp was embarrassingly loud, and his hips arched up. Hal scooted so he was fully on top of him, and the next time Bruce arched, those hips ground down into his.

"Oh God," he panted. 

"You like that?"

"Yes. Is that—is this all right."

Hal's eyes were large in the dark. "This is about the most all right thing I've ever done," he said, and ducked his head to Bruce's nipple again. He went back and forth between both of them, licking, sucking, laving, driving Bruce insane. Bruce gripped the sheets and bit his tongue, but Hal didn't let up. And then the grinding of his hips down into Bruce's—

His body had rocketed to arousal too fast. His arms shook as he tried to get control of it. It was just too much. It was _Hal_ , Hal's incredible body pressing down into his, and it was every frustrated jack-off fantasy of the last year sprung to glorious life. Hal was working a hand in between them as he sucked, and rubbing at the swell of Bruce's cock. He was. . . Christ, he was unbuttoning Bruce's jeans and sliding a hand inside. Not inside his underwear, but just rubbing on top of him, cupping, squeezing, rubbing, and in five more seconds he was going to come. 

He grabbed at Hal's wrist. "That's the second time you've asked me to stop," Hal whispered. "Am I doing something wrong?"

"No, I just—if you don't stop—I'll come."

"Oh, okay," Hal said. "I see the problem. Because making out is so much more fun where there's no prospect of sexual fulfillment? Is that something else they teach you at Princeton?" He shifted so he was pinning Bruce even more effectively, and unbuttoned the front of his own jeans. Then he was rubbing his hardness right on Bruce, pressing Bruce's arms down into the mattress. 

Bruce turned his face to the side and came, in long slow shudders that soaked his shorts, his jeans, spasms that pushed him against the mound of Hal's cock and balls, and he heard the stuttering groan that came out of his mouth but was powerless to stop it. "Sorry—sorry—" he panted. "I didn't—"

Hal was the one grabbing at his hand now, shoving it in his shorts. Bruce seized a handful of warm heavy cock and tugged, rubbed as rough as Hal seemed to want it. Hal bent his back and shot a heavy stream of come that landed on Bruce's chest. "Fuck fuck fuck," he moaned, pushing into Bruce's hand. "Oh—Jesus. . ."

Bruce quickly wiped at his chest so Hal could collapse down on him, and was careful to pull his shorts back up to cover him. For good measure he pulled at the blankets and brought them up, too, so Hal wouldn't feel exposed. He hated to wipe away the cum. He would have licked at it, tasted it, hell, worn it on his body for a week, but he wouldn't push things. Hal didn't need to find out that soon about all Bruce's peculiarities.

"Hey Bruce," Hal was mumbling against his chest. He was still breathing hard.

"Mm."

"So you somehow think that if I find out you really, really like sex, I'm going to run for the door?"

"Maybe."

"Hmph." Hal's head turned the other direction, and fell with a decidedly painful thump on Bruce's chest. "Moron." And after a few minutes: "Hey Bruce."

"Yeah," he whispered back.

"You're lying in cum-soaked shorts. Don't you want to get up and change?"

"You're right, move." He shoved Hal's head off and went to the bathroom. He grabbed a clean pair of briefs and slipped into them. Hal was waiting for him when he climbed back in bed, and this time Hal was the one who folded him in his arms. They drifted like that, neither waking nor sleeping, for some time. Every time he would slide into deeper sleep, he would remember the body beside him and jerk into wakefulness, touching Hal to make sure he was really there. From the touches that ghosted him in the night, he was pretty sure Hal was doing the same thing. Uncertain of each other, even in their sleep. Feeling their way, literally. 

They would learn how to do this.

* * *

It was near dawn when he woke to an empty bed. The room was still pitch black, and there was no Hal next to him. The bathroom door was closed, so he waited, and stretched out, enjoying the luxury of the whole bed for a few minutes.

"Why don't you just ask him out?" Clark had asked, ages ago, and Bruce had just rolled his eyes. 

"You have to be joking. Even you can see what a bad idea that is."

"No, 'even I' can't see that it's a bad idea. I mean, you like him, why not?"

"I don't _like_ him. I am physically attracted to him, but since I'm not an adolescent, I am capable of recognizing that hormonal delusion for what it is, and moving on with my life."

"Hormonal delusion? Do you even hear the things you say sometimes?"

"Yes, delusion. Otherwise known as lust. I'm sure some Sunday school teacher at some point explained that one to you."

"I see. So you just want to have sex with him."

"Correct."

"You don't have any actual _feelings_ for him."

"Correct again."

"You don't respect him as a person at all, or find him interesting."

"I don't find him _un_ interesting. I don't find him anything at all. This conversation is over."

"Oh okay, good thing you're not an adolescent."

Bruce had sighed in frustration. Trust Clark to misunderstand such a basic concept. "Look," he had said. "Regardless of anything else, being involved in any way with a fellow League member would be disastrous for team dynamics. It's a terrible idea."

"What? Now I know you're kidding. Come on, that's ridiculous. Who else are we going to date, honestly? Who else can understand the sort of pressures we face, the way our lives are constructed? That's just not reasonable, to place that sort of 'no dating' expectation on the League."

"I don't ask anything of them I don't expect of myself. And League members don't have to date a team member. Look at you and Lois."

"We're divorced, or do I need to remind you of that?" 

"Yes, but the point is, you had a good five-year run of it. And frankly, given the circumstances of our lives, I'd say five years is about the outer limit League members can expect for a romantic involvement anyway."

Clark had sighed even more deeply. "I think it's a good idea that we leave me in charge of team morale, for the foreseeable future."

But Clark had been right before: he had hated Hal. Loathed his very presence, and not just because the man had challenged his leadership at every turn, never missed a chance to slide in a disrespectful remark or a needling aside, and generally proved a thorn in Bruce's side whenever possible. It wasn't even that, at all. It was the sexual attraction that had so disturbed and revolted him. He had always known that on balance, he preferred the sexual company of men to women; that was why he tended to date only women, and to have sex with only women. It was attraction he could control, a sex life he could regulate. 

Hal was everything he had guarded against, when he had banked the fires of his own sexual appetites. And he had hated Hal for the threat he represented to all that careful control, more than he had hated the man's irritating presence. Hated him, and fucked his fist at night thinking about him, because an indulgence in his head was (he had reasoned) an indulgence he was less likely to act upon. He had imagined that beautifully muscled, tan and lithe body bent over him, riding his cock; imagined that beautiful back arching in pleasure, gasping, as he pounded that ass. His fantasies had gotten more explicit, more hungry as he went along. But he didn't worry: it was just sex. And then came the day Hal had turned in a meeting and given him that slow smile, muttering some wry remark just to him, and something in Bruce's chest had tightened, and he had realized how deeply, profoundly he had been mistaken, and how deeply, irrevocably screwed he was. 

The day Hal had walked into his office his heart had been wrung, watching the other man's pain. But he had known better than to offer sympathy, or anything other than an impassive ear. When Hal had begun to lose control he had sent him away; nothing would be gained by letting Hal give into his rage and frustration, and he had had no intention of telling Hal what he planned to do before he knew if it would work. False hope was too cruel to offer to his enemy, much less to Hal Jordan. 

Hal didn't seem to be returning from the bathroom. 

After another minute he flung back the covers. He meant to go knock on the bathroom door, see if Hal was all right, but on the way he glimpsed a phone—Hal's phone. Lying on the carpet. There was no reason for it to be over here. He picked it up, and swiped to the most recent text message. 

_From Barry_ , it read. A small knot of dread formed in his stomach. 

_Thanks a lot_ , Barry had written. _So instead of us all getting to see you tonight, you decide to spend the first night you're back with Bruce??? What a fucking surprise. Not like anyone else was hoping to see you tonight. Jesus Christ, Hal, what the hell. What the fuck are you doing? Is it just the money? I know things are rough for you right now but_

"No," he said, in a strangled choke. He clicked the phone off, unable to read any more. He strode to the bathroom and pushed back the door. Hal was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his head in his hands. 

"No," Bruce said again, and the rage washed over him. " _No!"_ he shouted, and he flung the phone as hard as he could. It exploded against the marble, skittered in seventeen different shattered pieces across the floor. Bruce dropped to his knees in front of Hal. 

"No. No no _no_. Do _not_ let him into your head, Hal, listen to me, do _not_ let him in," he said, desperate for Hal to look at him, to see him. 

"It's okay," Hal said. "I'm not. I wasn't. . . I just needed to think."

"Don't," Bruce said fiercely, and Hal gave a small laugh.

"Don't think about it, this is your answer? It's not like Barry is the only one who's going to think those things. He's just the only one saying them out loud, because he's pissed at me." He twisted around and looked at the tub.

"So do you actually use this thing? I've been having these mental images of you stretched out in there, piled to the ceiling with scented bubbles, and Alfred patting your feet with warmed towels. That's the way that happens, right?"

"That's exactly it, yes."

Hal looked at a piece of black plastic at his feet. "That was my phone," he said. 

"Yes. I lost control. I apologize. My temper is. . . well."

"Are you under the impression I'm new here? I know your temper. It's a hell of a lot better than mine, actually. I kind of think I want to take a bath in this thing."

"All right," Bruce said. 

"But first," Hal said. "You tell me the story. I think I'm ready."

"All right," he said again, and sat on the chaise longue, opposite Hal. 

"Wait," Hal said. "Before you start. Is there a worst part?"

"Yes."

"Tell it to me now."

Bruce studied his hands. "Amber is dead," he said. 

Hal was silent for a few minutes. "I see," he said. "Is that because of you?"

"I think so, yes. If you mean, did I directly kill her by force or violence, the answer is no. But if you're asking, did my actions lead in any way to her death, I think the answer would have to be yes. I did not intend for that to be the case. At least, I believe I did not intend it."

Hal nodded. "All right," he said. "Tell me."

* * *

He had not told Hal the entire truth ("Allow me to register my surprise," Hal interjected) about the ring, when he had said that no one had come to claim it. In the first few weeks after Hal's sentencing, a Guardian had actually appeared in the Cave late one night. He had thought that something like that might happen, so he had placed the ring in a locked steel strong box, bolted to the floor of the cave, just in case it threatened to float away, as Hal had said it might.

He had thought the Guardian was there to reclaim the ring, but she said that was not her intention; she was only there, she had claimed, to inspect the ring's temporary caretaker and make sure he was adequate. Apparently he had been. But before she had said that, he had started explaining Hal Jordan's innocence, and how they could not take the ring from an unjustly accused man—had pleaded for time to work out the solution to the murder, to clear Hal's name. 

"Of course he's innocent," she had said briskly. "We're perfectly aware of that. However, you must see to it that you do not use this ring at all. We agree to leave it in your trust as long as you maintain no physical contact with the ring at all."

And shortly afterward she had disappeared. Whether her appearance had been holographic projection or an actual physical presence, he had no idea; the cave's sensors weren't sophisticated enough to register whatever energy form the Guardians represented. But he had been satisfied with that, and pleased that whatever else might be taken away from him, at least Hal would have that.

He hadn't thought any more about the ring until the night with T-Bone, the night Jason had made that remark about wishing he had had a recording of T-Bone shitting himself with fear. And at that word, "recording," something had shaken loose in his brain, something he ought to have heard before. Because how, exactly, had the Guardian been so sure that Hal was innocent? He had not thought to ask that. In his driven, sleep-deprived state in those first few weeks, he had not thought to ask the obvious question. What had she meant by saying they were perfectly aware of Hal's innocence?

The Watchtower's database on the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians was woefully slender, and he had already memorized it years ago. But there was one source of information he hadn't plundered, and that was the data files in Clark's fortress. 

"Tell me you asked permission," Hal said. 

"It's not as though he would mind," Bruce said, and Hal groaned. 

He hadn't even really been sure he would find anything there; Clark's files were at best an incomprehensible mess, organized by some principle clear only to a Kryptonian brain, and it had taken him the better part of the day to even discover any entries on the Guardians of Oa. But the Kryptonians, as it turned out, had indeed been aware of the Guardians, though they had refused them permission to operate on Krypton. The files were fascinating, and told him much. They told him, for instance, that what animated the Lantern rings was actually a sentient force, almost a living being, and all rings were to some degree extensions of its consciousness. This meant that a ring was awake and in some way aware, like a living thing. It meant that a ring saw what was happening to its bearer, at all times.

It meant that the Guardians had known Hal was innocent because they had seen he was.

After that it was a simple matter to get in touch with them. After all, the Guardian had told him what they explicitly wanted him not to do, so it was only a matter of doing that thing and waiting for them to reach out to him. In the end all he had had to do was slip the ring on his finger, and a Guardian—not the same one—had instantly appeared before him, instructing him to remove it at once, or face terrible consequences.

He had explained what he was after: a recording of that night's events. He had tried every tactic he knew, from pleading to persuasion to intimidation, all to no avail. The Guardians were unmoved by any argument, even a Green Lantern's exoneration. At last, and reluctantly, they had granted him a kind of compromise. They would allow him to view what the ring had seen of the night's events.

The viewing had been astonishing. He had thought it would be a kind of projection onto a screen or maybe the wall of the cave. Instead, he had been pulled into the events of the night, but as a bystander watching things unfold, and helpless to change them. It had been like walking into a breathing three-dimensional memory, full of light and color and sound and smell. And he had seen exactly what Hal had described: after Bruce had pulled away from the curb (how strange, to see himself from outside his own body) Hal had landed a few more punches on Buck, and then walked away in disgust. The rest of what he had seen was Hal wandering aimlessly until he arrived at Middlevale Park, where he did nothing but sit in the darkness and watch the reflection of distant streetlights in the pond. 

But if he had been unprepared for Oan technology, Oans were in some respects unprepared for his. The cave cameras actually did a decent job of surreptitiously recording the Oan projection, though not of course—

"Oh my God you are going to jail. On Oa. That's like a thousand times worse than Watson, I hope you know. I cannot believe you did that." 

—though not of course in the terrifying reality he had experienced. The recording was flat and fuzzy and distorted, green-tinted and blurred. But he had watched it, over and over. And finally, in a dim corner of the screen, he saw what he had been hoping to see: the shadowy image of another human form. That had been three sleepless days and nights of manipulating the image to something recognizable that he could data search, but at last he had arrived at his first real break in the case.

He had a name.

The man who had been seen by the ring, the man who had been lurking around the corner while Hal beat Buck into the ground, was named Van Forteith. And in a stroke of true good fortune, he had a record—or at least enough encounters with law enforcement to register on the cave's database. He had been a low-level drug dealer for years, operating in the southeast and elsewhere. Never anything more than a middleman, but clearly a middle man with ambitions.

Tracking Forteith had been relatively easy, because he hadn't known he was being chased. Bruce had picked up his trail in Paris, and it was there he had finally run Amber to ground. Here Bruce paused, considering how much of his conversations with Amber to tell Hal. She had been angry, recriminatory, self-justifying. No one had ever meant to hurt Hal—she and Van had just needed a little money to set up business of their own. The five million had barely covered her debts, once the cartel had gotten hold of her; Bruce Wayne was a filthy fucking cheapskate. 

"Yeah, she's a piece of work," Hal said softly, and Bruce said nothing. In Paris, it had been easy to see what a beautiful woman she had once been, before the decades of drugs had destroyed her. There was Hal's bone structure, Hal's eyes. But it was all gone to ruin. 

She and Van had just needed a little extra scratch to start their own business, after the cartel had taken most of what Bruce had given her. That was about the time she had reconnected with Buck, and the three of them together had decided to pool their resources and see if they couldn't get themselves a slice of the heroin-dealing pie, at least in the southeast. So off Buck had gone, to see if he could shake loose some more change from Hal; after all, Amber's last foray had been so successful, it was hard for them to imagine Buck would meet with any less success. The plan that had formed in their meth-fried brains was vague at best, but it seemed to be something like, send Buck to shake down Hal, then wait overseas for him to return with the money. The possibility of Buck's double-cross had not occurred to Amber, but apparently it had to Van, and he had decided to trail Buck, just in case Buck decided to get greedy—or possibly to make it clear who was Amber's actual boyfriend now.

"How could anyone think I would ever hurt Buck," she had said to him. She had been staring out a rain-streaked hotel room window in one of the seedier Paris arrondissements, and her eyes—Hal's eyes—had been large and sad. Almost he had felt sorry for her.

"I mean," she had said. "He was the love of my goddamn life. That's what I can't forgive Hal, you know. He took Buck away from me."

That was when Bruce had had to stare fixedly at the dirty carpet, and still his hands that had wanted to close around her throat and squeeze. "He did," she had continued. "From the time that little shit was in middle school, he had his eye on Buck. He knew what Buck's weakness was. He just done it to hurt me, to make me look bad."

"Your twelve-year-old son," he had said, looking at her now. He had wanted her to hear the words she was saying. "Your _son_."

She had lit her cigarette and narrowed her eyes at him. "You don't know shit about Hal. He was a fucking little slut." 

It had felt like the moment with his fingers wrapped around T-Bone's windpipe, only a thousand times worse. He had held himself so still, counting even his breaths, the beat of pulse in his neck, because if he did not—if he did not, he would end her. His heart had become nothing but an iron block of hate in his chest. He let himself fantasize about a knife, a sword—one of Damian's. He could thrust it into her throat, but slowly, so slowly; slow enough that she would choke first on the swell of her own blood before he had even bisected her trachea. So easy it would be to do. He had dropped his eyes in order not to look at her.

That was the part he would never tell Hal. 

He had presented her with the circumstantial evidence for Van's involvement in Buck's murder, and she had rolled on him easily enough. And then he had made his mistake: he had left her alone. He had known Van was returning to the hotel room that night, but he had thought he could lie in wait and take him later. In truth he had not thought; he had simply wanted to be done breathing the same air as that woman. His anger had made him careless, and it had gotten her killed.

Or rather, her own idiocy had gotten her killed. She hadn't waited for Van to come back to the hotel, but had gone to find him. In her anger over Buck, she had found her courage. She had rushed to defend Buck, where she had never once defended or protected her son. But who knew how much of her brain the meth had eaten, and how long ago? Once, she might even have had a soul.

He had thrown Van through the doors of the Paris central police station with Amber's blood still on his hands, distraught (or high) enough to burble a confession. While he was at it, Van had helpfully confessed to Buck's murder as well, and that—combined with some artfully applied political pressure from Jim Gordon and the GCPD—had pushed the District Attorney into agreeing to a release date for Hal. 

"Where is she buried," was all Hal said, when he had finished, and they sat in silence. Bruce had to choke down his first answer at that, because all he wanted to say was _she should have been ground up for cat food, not given a burial like a decent human being_. But Hal knew all that; there wasn't a thing Bruce could tell him about his mother that he didn't already know. 

"In Kentucky," he said. 

"You did that."

"Yes."

Hal was quiet. And then: "You thought about going to the DA with what the ring showed you. With the recording."

"I did."

"You would have handed over my identity to government officials."

"If there had been no other way."

"Because Bruce Wayne always knows best." He stood then. Dawn light was graying the bathroom window by now. "Quite the body count you racked up, with all of that knowing best," Hal said. "Buck, and Amber, not to mention me. Who else along the way, or do you not count collateral damage?"

He clenched his jaw. "Is this where I lose you," he said.

"Lose me," Hal said incredulously. " _Lose_ me. How in God's name. . . what in God's name. . . Jesus fucking Christ on a toothpick. How the hell do you _lose_ me? What the hell makes you think you _have_ me? Bruce. We went to dinner. We had maybe the world's worst date once, on account of it ending in arrest. Then I went to prison, and I saw you maybe three hours total, if you added it all up. _Lose_ me? Can you please in the name of bleeding blue Jesus point to the place on this fucked-up timeline where we ever _had_ each other, could you please do that?"

"But we do," he said, keeping his eyes on Hal steady.

"Yeah," he said. "Goddammit. We do." He turned on the tap in one of the sinks, and stuck his head underneath it. He shook out his hair like a dog, drying on one of Bruce's towels, and he smirked at Bruce's expression of distaste. Then he came and sat down on the chaise longue beside Bruce. He ran his hand over the upholstery.

"This piece of furniture," he said. "Whatever the hell it's called. I'm not gonna lie to you, it's kinda gay."

"Well, that works out."

Hal laughed softly, and leaned against Bruce. "Let's go back to bed," he said. "And sleep for a week. We can have more awkward sex. It'll be fun."

"All right," Bruce said easily.


	14. Chapter 14

"And I haven't even _gotten_ to Third Form lacrosse tryouts," Oliver said, pouring Hal another glass of the Latour. "I'm betting you've never heard the one about Bruce beating the defending midfielder with his stick until the scoop broke in two. Like literally, in two pieces. You have never seen so much free-floating aggression in all your life, because this kid—I mean, _tiny_ little kid, fourteen-year-old Bruce was built like an angry cricket, came up to maybe my armpit—"

"All right, I think we're done," Bruce said, moving the bottle of Latour out of his reach. Dinah laughed and retrieved it, and Hal settled back with a grin. 

"Yeah, a young kid with violence and aggression issues, good thing Damian's nothing like his dad," Hal said with a nudge at Bruce's chair. 

"So the next day the midfielder comes up to me and says—"

"Okay, everybody's heard enough, and your stories are boring anyway," Bruce interjected. 

"What are you talking about, Ollie's stories are the best. Go on Ol, don't let him stop you."

"I have to admit," Clark said from the other end of the table, "I'm seeing a side of you I never saw before, _Cricket_. I think from now on I'm just going to be seeing Bruce wearing that uniform kilt with the—what did you say was underneath it, Ollie?"

Bruce groaned and threw his napkin at Clark, who just laughed, though not as loud as Hal. Hal could tell Bruce was not actually irritated—for one thing, nothing was on fire—but he wasn't above enjoying the man's mild embarrassment. Of course, what he was enjoying even more was the sight of Bruce, relaxed, unbent, making this kind of effort with Ollie and Dinah. 

"Of course," said Bruce, "in retaliation I could tell Dinah the real reason Oliver joined the League in the first place, beginning with when he came out of the showers and saw—"

"Hey now, hey now, no need to let this get out of hand," Ollie's loud voice cut across the table, and Bruce laughed. They were laughing so loud, and the after-dinner voices were rising so much, that they almost didn't hear the doorbell, but Dinah slipped out to answer it and came back with Barry and. . . some woman Hal did not know, to the sudden silence of the room. 

"Hey," Barry said. "Hey guys. I'm sorry we missed dinner. There was a big emergency at the lab, and everyone had to stay late, and I couldn't even get to my phone to text—Dinah, Ollie, I'm so sorry. We're not too late for dessert, I hope?"

"Of course not," Dinah said graciously. "Dinah Lance," she said, extending her hand to the very pretty brunette next to Barry.

"God, I'm sorry," Barry said. "Everyone, this is Amanda, and Amanda—ah, everyone."

The room's silence didn't seem to be lifting, and Hal understood why. Barry had just brought a civilian into a space where two minutes ago they had been only themselves, completely unguarded—Clark at the end of the table, no glasses or dorky clothes, hair pushed off his handsome face, looking for all the world like Superman, if anyone cared to look, and Bruce—Bruce's face had snapped shut like a wallet. He also caught Bruce's careful glance at Clark, and the way Clark was staring fixedly at the table.

"Hi," Amanda said shyly, and it wasn't like what Barry had done was her fault, after all. She seemed nice enough. She also seemed very much not Iris, which was hard to forgive her. Barry and Iris's divorce still didn't seem real to him, and seeing another woman with Barry was hard to process. He made an effort to stretch his face into a smile when he was introduced, and he found himself doing that thing he did now, where he watched people's faces to see if they were going to recognize his name. From her studied non-reaction, he figured Barry had told her everything. He wondered how long they had been dating.

"Your house is beautiful," she was saying to Ollie and Dinah. "I've always thought these condos on the bay looked amazing, but I never thought I'd get a chance to actually be inside one. It's just really beautiful."

"Thank you," Dinah said, and Hal could tell she was mashing Ollie's foot under the table. It roused him to a half-hearted hospitality.

"Amanda, could I. . . get you a drink of something? We were just about to have dessert, I think, but we could fix you up with a cocktail, or. . ."

"Oh no, we're good, Barry and I got started quite a bit earlier this evening," she said with a small laugh, and there went Barry's cover story about some bullshit emergency at the lab. Hal just fixed his glare on Barry, but Barry wasn't looking at him. 

"Oh my gosh," Amanda said suddenly, looking at Bruce, and oh no. Oh Jesus no. "Oh my gosh, you look—well, you probably get this all the time, but you look just like Bruce Wayne."

"Do I?"

"Well, yeah, I mean you _really_ do. I swear, if you did your hair different, maybe lost a little weight, you'd look _exactly_ like him."

"Ah ha ha," went Bruce's slight laugh. "Oh my. Barry, wherever did you find Amanda?"

"We were working a crime scene together, actually," she said, leaning forward. In any other circumstance Hal would have found her pleasant, her enthusiasm and clearly sweet nature endearing. Plus, she had just called Bruce fat, and that had been worth the whole price of admission. But right now she was shitting all over his evening, which might not be her fault, but it certainly wasn't making him her fan. 

"You work at the lab with Barry?" Dinah was saying, and Amanda laughed.

"Oh gosh no. I'm a photographer with _Sketchboard_ —well, sometimes I write some things, but I haven't got a byline yet. I mean, I haven't written anything that exciting yet, but I'm always hopeful. So that reminds me," she said, zeroing in on Hal. Clark quietly rose and excused himself, and he was pretty sure they wouldn't be seeing Clark anymore this evening, not after the word photographer had been mentioned. God damn Barry, what the hell was he thinking, bringing a tabloid photographer to dinner here, in this house? Barry had to be aware of the murderous glances being cast his direction, but he looked smiling and serene, absorbed in listening to Amanda. 

"Have you thought about the possibility of giving an interview to anybody?" she said to Hal, her eyes suddenly intent. "I mean, Barry's told me the whole story, and I remember reading some about it last year, and just, you know, congratulations to you for _everything_ , but I just think it would be so amazing, you know, to get your story out there, maybe let people know your side of things. I had a couple of title ideas you could—"

"I'm really not a publicity kind of guy," he said. "That's going to be a no."

"Oh," she said, and for a minute he thought maybe he had managed to crush her, but she brightened immediately. "Well, maybe after you've had some time to think about it, re-adjust to life. That's got to be really rough, after everything you've been through."

"Mm hm," he said, with a glance at Bruce's tight jaw, Ollie and Dinah's rigid faces. Barry was the only one smiling encouragingly at Amanda, who seemed to be one of those people with a gift for cheerful oblivion. 

"Have you thought about, you know. . . getting back in the swing of life yet?" she asked, with a mischievous glance at Barry, who just kept smiling at her. He had no idea what kind of sex Barry was getting from her, but it had better be phenomenal.

"Ah. . . well, I just got back not too long ago, so. . ." _Got back_ , he thought. He was going to have to come up with something better than that, but it still felt excruciating, for total strangers to know this much of his life, and he took refuge in whatever vagueness was available to him.

"Never too soon," she said brightly. "So I was talking about this with Barry on the way over here, and he thought it would be a _great_ idea. There's this girl who works with me, but she's not a photographer, she's a business manager, but really just a great person, you know? One of my best friends ever, her name's Julia, and she went through a tough break-up year before last and just has never really clicked with anyone else, but if you wanted we could even double date, so what do you think, can I give you her number? Barry said he thought you two would really hit it off, when he met her, didn't you?"

If it had been a silent room before, it was a tomb now. 

"Did he," Hal said, with a level look at Barry, who was looking anywhere but at him. Dinah was glaring narrowly at Barry, and Oliver's fist was clenching on the table. Bruce was perfectly still.

"Well," Hal said. He took a swallow of his wine. "The fact is, Amanda, I'm actually seeing someone."

"Oh!" she said. "Well, that's great! So, can I ask, is it a serious thing, or. . ."

"No, it's, it's pretty serious," he said, warming to his subject. "I would say, definitely serious. But one of those things where you know the person really well first, you know? And then you sort of find yourself one day with all these feelings you weren't even aware you had the day before, but they're just there, and unavoidable, and all of a sudden you can't even imagine being apart from this person, they're your—they're your whole world, you know? Maybe even someone you never thought you would want to be with in that way, or who would want you; maybe even someone you fought with a lot, but then you start to realize what was behind all those fights in the first place, and then you'll find yourself thinking about this person all the time, and you'll realize you can't begin to imagine a life without them."

Amanda was sitting with her chin practically in her hands, a dreamy expression on her face. "That's beautiful," she sighed. Bruce's hand came to rest on the back of his neck, just quietly. A thumb brushed the side of his neck. It was the first time Bruce had touched him this evening; the first time Bruce had ever touched him in front of other people, actually. 

Barry's chair screeched on the hardwood as he stood. "Something the matter, Bar?" Hal said. Barry stalked out. Amanda—poor Amanda, who definitely deserved better than this spectacularly shitty evening—looked confused.

"Let's get you some coffee," Dinah said, holding out her hand to escort a puzzled Amanda to the kitchen. "And maybe you'd like a tour of the place, while we're at it?"

"Oh. . . well, yes!" she gushed. "And if you wouldn't mind, maybe a couple of pictures? We could do a little shoot right in front of the balcony there, the light off the bay is just spectacular, have you ever considered. . . "

Hal rose. "Excuse me," he said, because this was over—Barry's bullshit games ended tonight. It was nobody's problem but his, and whatever he had done to create it, he was damn well going to be the one to fix it. "I'll be right back," he said, tossing his napkin on the table and striding out the door after Barry.

* * *

Bruce surveyed the wreckage of the dinner party. He sat in silence with Oliver for a minute. Then Oliver got up, went to a side cabinet, and pulled out a bottle of Macallan. He thunked a couple of glasses down on the table, and filled them with two fingers of the excellent scotch. There was nothing wrong with Oliver's taste in liquor. 

"What say we have a real drink," he said. 

"Line 'em up," Bruce said.

* * *

His first post-Watson shower had been a religious experience. He had cranked up all the nozzles in Bruce's enormous shower, and just stood under them with his arms spread, and he wanted to laugh from joy. It was almost as erotic an experience as discovering that Bruce Wayne's nipples were so extraordinarily sensitive he could practically come from having them steadily licked, and that was a bit of knowledge that would never get old. He started to feel guilty for using too much hot water before he realized a place like the Manor must have vast underground aquifers of steaming hot water, complete with nubile virgins rubbing heated stones together.

He stopped short at the thought of the nubile virgins. Nubile naked virgins. Not that he actually wanted to sleep with a virgin; experience was a thousand times sexier. He realized with a fist in his gut that he really, very much wanted to fuck a woman. He could almost feel the slide of hot cunt over his cock, soft flesh in his hands, the sweet sharpness of pussy in his mouth.

He slammed the water off and stood there, letting himself drip dry.

"Hey Bruce," he called into the other room. 

"Yeah." The bathroom door was ajar, but Bruce was standing just outside it. He wouldn't come in while Hal was naked; wouldn't push that until Hal was ready. And it was that _until_ that was the snake in the grass, because he could read the _until_ scrolling across Bruce's forehead, and he didn't have it in him to tell Bruce the truth, which was that _until_ was a false hope. The probable answer was, he would never be ready. It was like steering a ship, and you could see the rocks in the distance, and knew you were going to rip open on them, but couldn't do anything about it, couldn't steer to right or left.

"Everything all right?" Bruce asked, because he had gone silent.

"Are you gay?" 

There was no answer from behind the door, so he continued. "I mean, I made that crack about your furniture, and you said—but that was probably just. . . you know what, forget I asked, that was a terrible question. You should probably just forget I said that."

"It's not a terrible question. Although it does feel like a question I'd prefer not to answer through a door. May I come in?"

Hal tucked an impossibly fluffy towel around his waist. "Sure."

Bruce stepped inside. He was wearing just his underwear, and he went to the sink and started collecting his shaving equipment. He grimaced at the ruin of his razorblade—"sorry," Hal said with a wince—and laid out his soap and towel, wetting his skin. "I'm not avoiding your question," he said as he worked. "I'm just not sure what the correct answer is. If by gay you mean a man who has sex exclusively with men, then no, by that measure you'd have to call me bisexual. But if by gay you mean someone whose strongest attraction is to men, then yes, I'm gay."

"Oh," Hal said. It seemed a spectacularly inadequate response. He knocked it out of the park with an "Okay, then."

"You're not," Bruce said, calmly swiping his razor down the left side of his neck. 

"I'm not?"

"Gay."

"Well—I mean, I don't really—"

"You're bi."

Hal leaned against the wall and watched him shave. It seemed like an intimate thing to watch someone do. Bruce seemed undisturbed by it. Probably he was used to servants watching him dress all the time. "Truth is, I don't know what I am. But I. . . like women too, yeah. A lot. Is that. . . is that a problem?"

"Not for me." Bruce was rinsing his blade in the warm soapy water. Then he patted it dry. He was paying extraordinary attention to his razor. He stopped and put his hands on the sink.

"Hal. If I'm not what you want, please tell me now." His voice was quiet.

"You're all I want." Hal matched his voice to Bruce's. "But this is. . . hard for me. I don't exactly have any. . . I don't know how this works. I'm not. . . there's not some bank of good experiences with guys for me to draw on here, all right?"

"I know." Bruce was still intently interested in his sink. 

"And it may not get better," Hal said. 

"I know."

"You. . . seriously?"

Bruce shrugged, some small indecipherable motion Hal hadn't yet learned to read. It occurred to him Bruce had not lied to him, once, ever, about anything. Never told him less than the truth, so he had no reason to think his calm 'I know' was some sort of front. Well. One bit of nakedness deserved another. Hal undid the knot on his towel and let it fall to the floor. He could see Bruce restraining his eyes. Yes, he was shorn of some twenty-five pounds, but he still knew it wasn't a bad view.

Bruce's eyes began at his feet and traveled up, and missed nothing along the way. When he was done, in silence he stripped off his own shorts. They were naked in the bathroom together, just looking. "You know you are fucking magnificent, right?" Hal said. The small frowning twitch between Bruce's eyebrows told him the answer to that. 

He raised his hand and traced one of the larger scars that half-mooned his hipbone. "Ouch," he said. 

"Yes." Hal heard him swallow. He also saw the slow motion of his cock, as it unfurled a bit. Bruce's hands resting on the sink had become a deathgrip. 

"You can touch me too, if you want," Hal said.

Bruce didn't touch. He just kept looking, but his look was as heavy and intentional as a hand running over his body. And then he did something strange, that for a moment Hal couldn't place: he knelt. Knelt with his bare knees and his half-hard cock on the bathroom floor. He looked up at Hal.

He wouldn't come closer. Hal could see that. He was asking, but he wouldn't press. 

Hal took the step that moved him closer, then another one. His own cock had started to swell. Bruce raised a hand to touch, and glanced upward, looking for Hal's eyes, and it was then that he realized: every single thing Bruce did, he would ask permission. Just that simple thing. He would never touch Hal in any way without asking permission first, for the smallest thing. And knowing that—seeing that—understanding that in his bones for the first time, that such a thing could be, that someone, anyone, would just ask first—it broke him open. He took his cock in his hands and rubbed the head against Bruce's lips, and Bruce's mouth opened on a groan and swallowed him whole. 

"Oh fuck," he panted. "Oh—Oh Jesus." He closed his eyes and let the blow job of his life happen, and every ugly thing that wanted to intrude he pushed savagely away from him, feeling only this moment, this time right here, and Bruce, Bruce, Bruce with his mouth on him.

"You are. . . disturbingly good at this. Jesus _Christ_. How are you so good at this." He wasn't even able to warn when he came. "Sorry—God, sorry," he managed, but Bruce had swallowed him, _swallowed_ his cum like he was hungry for it. "I—wow. Sorry," he said again. 

Bruce had stood. There was a small wicked smile on his face, his beautiful face, and then it hit Hal in the gut what he had done, the way he had just used Bruce's body for his own pleasure—someone he cared about, he had done that to them, how could he have done that. He pushed Bruce roughly away. "I'm sorry," he said again, through numb lips, and there was no more smile on Bruce's face. 

"Hal," he said, his hands on Hal's face, Hal's shoulder.

"No, wait, I'm—sorry. I'm fucking this up. Shit. Sorry. Sorry for saying sorry. Jesus Christ. I'm gonna shut up now."

"Okay," Bruce said. "If only I'd known all those years ago that was all it took."

Hal laughed, just a short whuff of a laugh. "I would have liked to have seen that," he said. "Could have saved both of us a lot of trouble if you had just dropped to your knees and sucked my cock when we first met."

"I did," Bruce said. "I took off my cowl."

"Yeah." Hal grinned. That was a fun moment to think about—that moment when Big Black and Freaky had pulled back that cowl, and Hal had thought _Holy shit, Crazy is ridiculously smoking_. "So that was you flirting," he said. "In the middle of a potentially universe-destroying battle, you took the time to check out the ass of the neighborhood hottie."

"Oh don't worry, I'd already checked your ass."

They were leaning casually against the bathroom counter, and Bruce seemed to be ignoring his own substantial stiff one. That cock was quite the stunner. It arced hungrily in Hal's direction. Bruce himself seemed unconcerned. For a half-second, Hal considered sinking to his knees and licking his way down that magnificent shaft, but that—there were about a thousand things he would feel comfortable doing before that one. Bruce might be very understanding about his various weirdnesses, but he would probably prefer it if Hal did not stage a meltdown over top of his boner. The man didn't deserve that.

"That shower was pretty damn exhausting," Hal said. "Tell you what, I think I'd better go back to bed. Come on," he said, tugging at Bruce's hand. 

Bruce complied, and let Hal wrap them up in the sheets. "Turn around," Hal whispered, and Bruce did that too. He snugged against Bruce's naked backside and snaked a hand around and gripped that cock, giving him long slow slides of his hand. He took it slow, and enjoyed watching Bruce arch as that long body bent like a bow under his hands. He liked seeing Bruce chew his lip to bloody shreds as he tried not to make noise. 

"Hey Bruce," he whispered in his ear. "Get loud for me."

And Bruce did that too, just like he asked. "Hey Bruce," he whispered again. "Will you do anything I ask you to, in bed?"

"Y—yes," he panted. "God."

"Anything?"

"Anything."

"Then do this one thing for me."

He was twisting almost out of Hal's arms, his breathing loud rasps by now. "Yes," he managed.

"Come for me," Hal whispered, so softly, and Bruce's body collapsed on itself. He fountained cum in long heavy irregular spurts. It made Hal's balls contract a little to watch it. Bruce had his hand on Hal's head, fingers twisted in his hair. "Was that good baby," Hal whispered. "Did my hand feel good for you."

"Nngah," Bruce groaned.

"Well said." Hal began nuzzling his neck, the side of his face, whatever parts were available to him. "Hey Bruce."

"Mmm."

"It's okay if we just do this for about a week, right? I'm thinking shower, eat, fuck. Maybe we can mix up the order a little bit. I'm flexible."

"Mmmng."

"Did I break you or something?"

Bruce rolled heavily toward him, twisting the covers hopelessly. "Something like," he murmured. He began returning Hal's kisses, just lazy and a bit sloppy. The mouth that was kissing him had been around his cock, and hadn't found it degrading or disgusting. He had been hard afterward, which had been the most surprising thing about it. He had looked. . . happy, almost, to be doing it. Almost like he had wanted to. 

"Bruce," he whispered again. He had his fingers twined in the darker hair. "Hey, I'm sorry I didn't—couldn't—you know, in the bathroom. . ."

Bruce's thumb pressed on his lip, effectively quieting him. Then the hand drifted down his body, stroking, exploring, and he realized that Bruce was just imitating what he was doing—that his own hands had been questing over Bruce's naked body for the past few minutes, too. 

"So, yeah, well," Hal sighed. "I'm probably in love with you, which I'm hoping is okay. But you may not be a saying-the-words kind of guy. Totally fine by me, I was just updating you on the general situ—"

Bruce's body more or less landed on his, and the tongue down his throat had gone from lazy to _let me wipe your brain of all higher cognitive function_ in like four seconds flat, and Hal had to struggle to get breath, almost. "So that's an okay then," he panted, breaking for air, but then he was pulled back down and rolled so he was on top, and really, that shower-eat-fuck thing had been more of a guideline, not like a hard-and-fast, and if Bruce wanted to make it shower-fuck-fuck-fuck that was going to be one hundred percent fine by him. That sort of schedule wasn't going to fit him back in his clothes anytime soon, but sometimes fashion had to take a back seat to the most mind-blowing orgasms in the history of the world.

* * *

"There's something I should tell you," Bruce said on day three of their 'let's never leave this room and fuck each other brain dead' marathon. The plan was, this was the day they would actually return to the world of the living. Bruce was checking his phone when he spoke, so Hal, who was plowing his way through yet another tray from Alfred, thought it had something to do with what he was reading on his phone, which was why he was unprepared when Bruce looked up from his phone and said, "You don't need to look for a new apartment."

Hal put down his fork. Which was hard, because there was still a bit of waffle on it, not to mention whipped cream. "Oh," he said. "Ah." 

It surprised him, but didn't totally surprise him. The truth was, he could see Bruce being like one of those murderous she-wolves that decided to adopt a motherless kitten and dragged it back to her lair to lick and brood over it and growl at anyone who tried to approach and carry it around in her mouth for months, pushing bloody bits of carcass at it and ripping open the throat of anyone who looked at it funny. It was just that he didn't particularly care for being the motherless kitten, in this case.

"Well, listen," he tried. "I think that a little occasional space would be—you know, I mean not to suggest that I don't want to be with you too, it's just that—two healthy adults can—"

"For God's sake," Bruce sighed. "I'm not asking you to move in with me."

"Oh," Hal said in relief. "Okay, thank God. But just out of curiosity, why not?"

Bruce was giving him the squinty glare that in his head Hal called the 'every now and again I remember I am having sex with you and struggle to remember why' look. "Just stop talking," he said. "I'm trying to say, you don't need to look for a new apartment because you still have your old one."

Hal went for another stab at the waffles, scooping up plenty of strawberries with the whipped cream this time. "And why's that," he said. "Because you somehow remembered to pay my rent along with my phone bill, or something?"

Alfred's waffles were truly a thing of beauty, and eating them could distract you from everything else going on around you. They were mesmerizing, and for a man who claimed he didn't have much of a sweet tooth himself, he seemed to know exactly how to build a coma-inducing pile of sugar on a breakfast tray. Probably it gave the man a nice break from whipping up algae shakes, or whatever it was Bruce ate for breakfast. In this case, they could distract from the sudden silence in the room. Hal put down the fork.

"Sweet fistfucking goddamn," he said. "That's what you did, isn't it."

"Hear me out."

Hal kicked the breakfast cart away, and stalked to the window, bracing on the windowframe. "I didn't pay for a thing," Bruce said. "I didn't pay your phone bill either. You paid for all of that."

"Right," Hal said. "The fucking unicorns. I forgot about them. Bruce, Jesus Christ, listen to me, because I am not shitting around. You cannot do this to me, you cannot treat me like some—"

"Are you finished with your tantrum, or would you like to listen to me? League members make a salary, which you wouldn't know about because your income level has always been well above any needed supplemental. But salaries are available, especially considering we ask members to drop any commitments they have at a moment's notice and place themselves at the League's disposal. This was a policy we instituted some time ago, long before your situation, in fact. When you left Ferris—"

"Meaning when I was imprisoned and lost my job?"

"When you left Ferris, your income level made you eligible for receiving an income from the League. You've been receiving a salary for the past eleven months. You are by no means penniless."

"I see. And the fact that I wasn't actually doing jack shit for the League, that doesn't figure into your calculations at all?"

"If I had come to you," Bruce said. "If Clark had come to you, if any of us had come to you, and said we have an emergency, you have to help us, would you have hesitated to take your ring and do what was necessary? If the fate of the planet had hung in the balance, would you have answered the call?"

"Of course," he said irascibly. "But that's not the point."

"Don't be obtuse, that is exactly the point. That's why you continued to bank a salary from the League. You have your apartment, and all your things."

Hal sat back on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands. The bed was a mess. In truth he didn't know what to say. He had just been handed back everything he thought he had lost, or at least. . . most of it. "Because I can't get a job," he said. "That's why, isn't it."

Bruce was silent. "It's not like I didn't read the paperwork," Hal continued. "When they released me. It's not like Claymore didn't spell it out. My sentence was altered to time served, to save the state the possibility of a lawsuit, and to cover the DA's ass."

"Yes," Bruce said, in the quietness.

"It's not like I don't know I'm a convicted felon," he said. "I fly again when hell freezes over." When Bruce said nothing, he turned to look at him, stretched on the bed behind him. "What, you're not going to offer to buy me an F-15?"

"Do you want me to?"

Hal gave a snort of a laugh at that, and balled up his napkin. He wasn't hungry any more. He fell back on the bed, stretched beside Bruce, and put his hands over his face. "Treat you like what," Bruce said, so quietly it was hard to hear him. "You said I cannot treat you like some. . . what?"

"Nothing," Hal said. "Forget it."

Bruce tugged at the hands covering his face. "Not in this bed," he said. "Not here. Hal."

"I'm trying. Sometimes you make it really fucking difficult."

Bruce bowed his head, rested it lightly on Hal's chest. "Well," Hal said. "There's this about being a convicted felon. I don't have to vote anymore, so that shitshow can all be someone else's fault. I can get one of those bumperstickers that says, don't look at me, I didn't vote for any of these assholes. And a job—who really wants to have to get up in the morning, am I right?"

"Not me, usually."

"There you go. And hey, maybe I can explore new lines of work. There's bound to be something else I can do besides fly shit through the air. You've got a job, something where you sit at a desk, am I right? What's that job called?"

"Billionaire CEO."

"Is that hard?"

"Depressingly not."

"Well maybe I can do that. Ask around, will you?"

"I'll look into it." 

They stayed like that for a few minutes, just drifting quietly, until Hal remembered his waffles. He reached over with one hand and stabbed another forkful—an awkward reach, but he didn't want Bruce to move. He chewed in appreciative silence.

"You're eating over top of me."

"'S good food."

"That thing you said yesterday. You know that. . . goes both ways. Certain things. . . they will be easier for you than for me. I know that—from a certain point of view— physical expressions are. . . more difficult for you. And for me, the reverse will be true, just. . . verbally. In words. If you see what I mean."

Hal's fingers plucked at the napkin, and wiped the remains of the syrup off his mouth. "Good thing I speak Wayne," he said. "That was fucking inscrutable."

"How does a flyboy even know a word like inscrutable."

"Fourth grade flirting," Hal said with a grin, and Bruce crawled on top of him, pinning him. There was syrup still on the corner of his mouth, and Bruce's wickedly skillful tongue attacked it. Maybe the world of the living could wait a while longer.

* * *

Getting a car felt like step one of Hal Jordan's life recovery program, and he got that done that on day four. "Mission accomplished," he said to Bruce, dangling his new keys with pride. Bruce frowned.

"Already?"

"What do you mean already, I've been gone all morning. Car acquisition: check. Is there anything for lunch, or should I go get something?"

Bruce's frown was just deepening. "Just like that? What did you get?"

"Hyundai. I mean Honda. One of those."

"Model?"

"Nope, gotta pay extra for those. I'm hoping if I keep hanging with you, though, I'm bound to get lucky at some party or other. Oh stop looking at me like that, it's a Crossroad."

"Do you mean Crosstour?"

"Yeah, that. World's most unexciting car, but what do I care, I got a deal. Just a couple years old, too."

"How many miles?" 

"You mean. . . from here to the dealership?"

Bruce put down his tablet. "You don't know anything about cars, do you?"

"Nope. My philosophy of transportation vehicles is, if it doesn't have wings, I don't give a shit. Researching cars is like debating which brand of vanilla is the blandest."

"My God," Bruce said, not in reproach but with a kind of wonder—what Hal had come to think of as the 'I've heard you people exist but never really believed it' tone of voice. Hal just laughed and tossed back a handful of peanuts from the little vending machine bag he had gotten at the dealer. Even Bruce couldn't kill the buzz of his new-found independence. The truth was, the new (old) car had been top of his list, because that was what allowed him to drive back up to Watson on the second Saturday after his release. 

He had rolled over in bed at 5:30 (that was going to be a hard habit to break) and reached for his clothes. Bruce was still sleeping, unsurprisingly, so Hal gathered his things to dress in the bathroom. His bathroom, actually—they had spent the night at Hal's apartment, and he noticed how neither of them were having the 'maybe we should acknowledge normal humans spend time apart from their lovers on occasion' conversation. But it wasn't like he was going to be the one to bring it up. 

When he emerged from the bathroom, Bruce's eyes had cracked open slightly. He seemed to have the same sort of radar Hal himself did for when Bruce went suddenly missing from the bed. "Where are you going," he muttered huskily, and Hal bent down to kiss him. 

"Just taking a little drive," he said. "You sleep. I won't be back till later today. You want to have dinner at the Manor tonight? Alfred said something about lobster."

"He's just trying to make you fat," Bruce said on a yawn, burrowing down into the covers. "Mm," he said, to Hal's soft scratch of his head. "You're going to Watson," he said, because Bruce was like that—you would think he was dead to the world, but he had been seven clicks ahead of you the whole time.

"Yeah," Hal said. "I am." 

A sleep-warm hand worked its way through the covers to his arm. "Don't," Bruce said.

"Babe. This is not a negotiable situation."

Bruce grunted and rolled over. "Just give me a minute to get my clothes on," he said. "I can come with you."

Hal stilled him with a hand on his chest. "You sleep. I'll be back later this afternoon."

Bruce subsided. He said nothing, but his eyes were doing that thing they did where they flicked all over Hal's face and then rested back on his eyes, like he was reading messages there. "All right," he eventually said. "I'll just go through your things while you're gone."

Hal laughed. "Babe, I am one hundred percent sure you did that like, months ago." 

Bruce's snort was not one of disagreement. Hal leaned over and brushed another kiss on his forehead, then gathered up his keys and headed for the door. His drive to Watson was uneventful, and he listened to music—even the whining country station that was all he could get upstate, because he didn't want to be alone with his thoughts right now. He ignored the coldly assessing eyes of the guard at the gate, and paid no attention to the stares of the guard on duty at the registration desk. It was all worth it for the moment of seeing Sol round the corner to the visitors' room, his face lighting up.

"Fly," he gasped, and Hal pulled him into an embrace he didn't want to loosen. "Man, how'd you do that? I didn't put you on no list," Sol said with a grin.

"Well, I had a little help working around the rules on that one," Hal said. The kid guard had done him a solid on that one, and he would not be forgetting it. "But you'll keep me on the list now, yeah?"

"I don't know, let's see how the next thirteen minutes go before we get all ahead of ourselves," Sol said. 

"I totally forgot what an asshole you are. God, it's good to see you."

"You too man," Sol said, but there was a shadow on his face that kept Hal watchful.

"So you still got your date, right? How many more weeks?"

Sol shrugged. "I don't even know. It. . . there's some shit with the parole board. There's always something. Don't even worry about it."

"Sol. What the fuck are you talking about? Have they moved your date back?"

Sol's shrug was more of a twitch. "Now they tell me it's pending. And on top of that Tandy and Jamaica and them have decided they gonna fuck with me, and I don't even know man, I don't even know."

Hal hunched forward. "Jamaica. What the hell's Jamaica giving you shit for? That is fucked up. You can't let them get to you—you know they're just trying to fuck with you because you've got a date and they don't. Just hang on, man. You'll be out of here soon."

"For what," he said. "So I can do what. What the fuck job am I going to get? Shit, I won't be able to get a job shaking the fry basket at the Mickey D's, and you know that's the truth. I just. . . I don't know man, I just don't know. I don't give a shit anymore." And he sat there staring at the table, his eyes more remote than Hal had ever seen them. Hal wanted to reach across the table and touch him, grab onto him, slide a hand on the broad sturdy back that looked so defeated right now—but he couldn't, of course. No touching. Someone he cared about was in pain, and he had to sit here frozen in helplessness. So that was what that felt like. 

"Listen to me," Hal said, low. "Sol. Listen. My cousin, you remember my cousin?"

Sol nodded. Hal could see the misery in every line of him now. He had been masking it before, probably because he hadn't wanted Hal to worry. But seeing Sol like this was filling him with a strange panic. "My cousin has—he's in business. He's got this company, all right? I swear to you, I promise you, he will have a job for you. I swear it. All I will need to do is ask him. He hires people who—people who sometimes can't get hired anywhere else, good people who need a helping hand. He's a good man Sol, he'll do this if I ask it."

"Your cousin," Sol said. "Why the fuck he gonna give a shit about me?"

"Because you're my friend," Hal insisted.

"Right," Sol said. "Your cousin who ain't your cousin. "

Hal went silent at that. "Like I even cared," Sol said. "Like I even gave a shit. But I'm just dumb, right? And a bigot, too, I guess. That's the thing, man‚ it's that you thought I was both those things. Couldn't you have just picked _one?_ But naw, man. I guess niggers got to be both."

"I'm sorry," Hal said, his eyes on the table and his hands. "I just. . . I'm not used to sharing. . . that part of me. I couldn't take the risk." But that wasn't entirely it, and he knew it. He wouldn't have known what word to use to describe what Bruce was to him, or he to Bruce. Even now, he was unsure of the available vocabulary, or its relevance to his life.

"Whatever," Sol said. "It was good to have a visitor though. You not a bad man, Fly, even if you do have your head up your ass twenty-three hours of the day."

"But it's that one hour where I really make it up, right?"

Sol shook his head with a rueful laugh, and slowly stood. He extended his hand, and Hal took it. Sol looked at the piece of paper Hal had pressed into his palm. "My cell number," Hal said. "Please call. Call me every day if they'll let you. Don't let Jamaica get to you, don't let them fuck up your date for you."

Sol just shook his head again, and then he was shuffling off to the glass enclosure, and Hal wanted to scream inside. As awful as it had been making that walk back to the enclosure with the guards waiting for you, standing here was a thousand times worse. That was another thing he had not known. 

Back in the car, he just sat there. After a few minutes he called Bruce, who answered on the second ring. "Hey," Hal said. 

"Everything all right?"

"Yep. Yes. It's. . . fine."

"How convincing."

"No, I mean it, it was fine. I just. . . wanted to hear your voice." There was silence on the other end of the line, and Hal sighed. "For which you would actually have to speak, but never mind I guess."

"I knew I should have gone with you."

"That would have been a million times worse. Jesus. I feel like I want to throw up. Is that. . . is this what it was like, every time you came up here?"

A pause. "Yes."

"Christ on a cracker."

"Bad news about the lobster," Bruce said. "You forgot Ollie and Dinah are having a dinner for you tonight."

"Shit, that's tonight?"

"According to Dinah's text it is."

"Think they'll have lobster?"

"They're vegetarian."

Hal frowned. "Wait. . . really? I don't remember that. Both of them?"

"Well, Oliver's more of a Dinah-tarian. Meaning he won't eat meat if there's the remotest chance Dinah will find out about it."

Hal laughed, softly. The heavy iron weight across his chest eased a little, at the thought of Ollie scarfing up grocery store chickens and stuffing the bag in the neighbor's trash. "Hey," he said. "So here's something you should know. I might have just told Sol you could help him with a job when he gets out."

"I thought that was understood."

"Yeah, I know, just checking. Okay, I need to get gas and get on the road. You need anything from the gas station? Southwestern ranch Pringles, Frosty Cherry Slurpee? You know what I haven't had in a while, is the Cheesy Garlic Bread Lay's. Those are the best Lay's."

There was another silence, and Hal laughed into it. "You're struggling with a lay joke, aren't you?"

"It didn't come together, never mind."

"Fourth-grader. I'll call you when I'm close to town. Hey Bruce."

"Yeah."

"I love you."

He didn't expect a response; it was an unfair thing to do on the phone to anyone, but especially to Bruce. But he listened anyway, and what he heard was a long shuddering exhale. "Get home soon," Bruce growled, and Hal smiled. 

He didn't even know what Bruce meant by home—the Manor, Hal's apartment, maybe that billion-dollar armor-plated satellite floating through space? But on the other hand, he knew exactly what Bruce meant by home: it was all of those places and none of them, because it was anyplace Bruce was with him, and he was with Bruce. It was a space they created together, and bounded by the circle of their arms—improbable, unexpected, necessary as air. It wasn't a space in which all problems were solved; Barry was still being a passive-aggressive dickhole to him (he was going to deal with that tonight one way or the other), he had no idea what the hell kind of job he could find that would still let him fly F-15s, and the odds were that the Guardians were about to order his ass to Oa for an extended tour of duty (their opinion of Watson being something like a resort spa, and his time there akin to vacation, he could already tell, and wasn't Bruce going to love that one.) 

It wasn't even a space in which all pain was erased, or all difficulties eased, and it definitely wasn't some magical place in which they became people other than the irascible, wary, complicated individuals they were, who would continue to fight and disagree and be angry and make terrible mistakes and probably find a thousand ways to fuck everything all to hell before breakfast, and put it back together by lunch. 

In other words: home.

He clicked the phone off with the smile still on his face, and pulled out the gates onto the highway downstate.


	15. Epilogue: Missing/Deleted Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've had requests for what happened in that confrontation between Hal and Barry, at the dinner party that night, so this is my attempt to answer that question, and fill in some missing gaps for interested readers.

"What the _fucking_ hell," Hal said. "What the ever-living fucking hell."

"Get your hands off me," Barry said, pushing him away.

"Why the hell should I? What the fuck— _where_ the fuck are you, Barry? Because I don't see my friend any more. I go to prison, and you can barely squeeze a letter out your tight asshole, and I come back and—what the fuck was that tonight, what the hell did you think you were doing in there?"

Barry's back was against the wall of the building, and his eyes were glinting dangerously at Hal in a way he didn't recognize. "Why are you fucking him," he said. Hal's jaw tightened. If it tightened any more, he was going to crack a bone. 

"You know what? There are a thousand answers to that, and you don't deserve any of them. The only answer you get, is because I want to. Because I want to, Bar, that's why. And for your information, it's not just fucking, it's—"

"Yeah, I heard," Barry said. "That was very touching, really moving, your little declaration there. Jesus Christ, Hal, can't you see he's using you, can't you see you're just a means to an end for that bastard? He can only ever see people like pieces on a chessboard, and that's all you are to him."

"Oh," Hal said. "Oh, okay, Barry, sure. Bruce Wayne needs an unemployed ex-con to suit his own nefarious purposes. I'm sure he can really use me to—"

"You're the _Green Lantern!"_ Barry shouted, and Hal managed a quick glance around them. They were behind Oliver and Dinah's building, and there didn't seem to be anyone else nearby, but for fuck's sake. "You're the fucking Green Lantern," Barry said, his voice lower. "You think that doesn't enter into his calculations? You and Clark are the two most powerful individuals in this part of the galaxy, and if you think Bruce doesn't want a piece of that, you're crazier than I thought."

"Bruce doesn't want a ring, or anything to do with one," he said, but he hated the part of him, the tiny, untrusting part of him, that sat up and raised its head and said _are you sure about that_. 

"Not the ring, you idiot," Barry said. "He doesn't want to take your ring, he wants the access it gives him. The Lantern Corps is the single greatest intelligence agency in the universe. Only an idiot thinks Batman doesn't want constant unfiltered access to _that_."

 _Of course he would want that_ , said that small ugly part of him, but the larger, saner part of him knew Bruce had never asked him a single probing question about Lantern business, never pried into. . . but he had talked to the Guardians. He had figured out what the ring could do. He had attempted to secure information from the Lanterns. _For your own release_ , he argued back at himself. But the knife of Barry's doubt had lodged in his skin. 

"Him or me," Barry said, and Hal took a step back, like it was a physical blow.

"You don't mean that," he said.

"I do. I mean it for your own good. You choose, right here, right now. Him or me." 

"Fuck you," Hal spat. "Stop bullshitting about my own good, you're saying it because you hate Bruce, for nothing he ever did to you. He's never done anything to you but trust you, and fight beside you, and—"

"He took you from me." He said it so quietly Hal almost didn't catch it, and when he did he sat on the low stone wall behind them, suddenly defeated. He sat there in silence, just looking at the manicured tufts of grass at his feet.

"Barry," he said. "We never—I never knew that you. . ."

"Does it make a difference, now that you do?"

Hal looked up at him. "No," he said. He couldn't think of any way to soften that, or any way to explain it. Would it have made a difference, years ago, if he had known that straight, married Barry was at all interested? If he was being honest with himself, yes. Of course it would have made a difference. He would have been all over Barry, in a red hot minute. That lean taut body, those eyes, that slow lazy smile? Hell yes he would have. And even now, even now he could stretch out his hand and—

Jesus Christ, what the hell was wrong with him.

* * *

Bruce swirled the scotch in his glass and considered the view across the bay, and the lights glimmering on the other side. Barry's unfortunate date had been right about that; it really was a spectacular view. Everything in the house was a bit too sleek and modern for his tastes, but then, growing up in a giant Gothic pile had a warping effect on one's preferences. He didn't turn at the click of the door behind him, as Dinah came to join him on the balcony.

"You guys got started without me," she said, and he offered her his glass in silence. "Oh, I'm good, thanks."

"What did you do with Amanda."

"Oliver's getting her in a cab headed safely back home. I let her take pictures of the living room. Somewhere there is going to be a photo in some horrible tabloid captioned 'Mrs. Oliver Queen Smiles Like a Homicidal Maniac In Front of Her Fireplace.' God help me. I'm going to strangle Barry."

Bruce said nothing, but took another swallow of the scotch. It was truly excellent liquor. "No sign of Hal, I take it," she said, and he regarded the scotch.

"No," he said. "I don't expect there to be."

They were silent together, and she studied the view like it was new to her, leaning on the rail next to him. "You missed Wednesday's appointment," she said, after a while.

"So much for keeping our social and professional lives separate," he said. 

"Yes," she acknowledged. "Although I could probably count on one hand the number of times we've socialized. Actually, I could count it on one finger, and that would include tonight. If being with Hal means we get to see more of you, that would make me very happy. And Oliver too, for what it's worth."

"Don't get too excited," he said, and took another swallow of the scotch. "Tonight is the night I lose."

"Lose," she said. "What are you talking about?"

He swirled the scotch in his glass clockwise, then shifted it to counterclockwise, studying it the whole time. "Barry is making him choose right now," he said. "And I'm going to lose." With a deft motion he drained the rest of the scotch. 

She said nothing to that, but then he didn't expect her to. What was there to say? "It's funny," he said. "For a while there, I will admit, I really did think I was going to win. I honestly thought it was a possibility."

"What would winning look like?" 

He wished he still had more scotch to drink. He thought of the upper drawer of his dresser, and the small box with two platinum rings that nestled there. It had been a foolish impulse, buying them, but an impulse he hadn't been able to resist. He hadn't thought it was even something they would talk about right away; years later, maybe. He had been willing to wait, as long as it took. 

He was silent at Dinah's question not because he didn't know what winning looked like, but because he knew exactly what it looked like. 

"You ought to get yourself a glass of this scotch," he said. "If Ollie left any. It's some of the best Macallan I've ever had."

She was looking at him with the same quiet, undeceived gaze she aimed at him in her office. Sometimes he thought it was pity, and that enraged him, but on his better days he recognized it for something more complicated than pity—some strange blend of sorrow and understanding, shaded by what he would have to call a certain fondness. It was possible the name for it was friendship. 

"I'm not much of a scotch drinker," she said. "But you should consider this, and keep in mind reading people is what I do for a living. Bruce. You don't lose."

He shook his head, impatiently. "That's not something you can possibly—"

" _Bruce_. Hear me. You don't lose."

He hated the flicker of hope she awoke in him, hated that he clutched at it. He wished he could hate Hal, but that would never happen. What do you want with him, Barry was saying right now, and he was making Hal think about that one. Right now he was reminding Hal of every excellent reason he wanted nothing to do with Bruce, and there would have to be several dozen of those. He wondered if Hal had taken a moment to open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and if he had considered the row of meds there, and what exactly each one indicated.

"You forget," he said. "Losing is what _I_ do for a living."

* * *

"You listen, and you listen good," Hal said. "You can be in my life, or you can be out of it. But if you're in my life, that means accepting that I'm with Bruce. And if you can't accept that, then you're out of my life. I can't make it any simpler than that."

Barry was shaking his head. He was braced against the wall now. "I can't believe you," he was saying. "I can't believe. . . you would choose him over me."

"Fuck you for making me choose. Bruce would never have—"

"Fuck that," Barry snarled. He had lurched from the wall and was right in Hal's face. "Saint Bruce, _Bruce_ would never make me choose, _Bruce_ can do no wrong, _Bruce_ doesn't want to use me like he uses everyone and everything, _Bruce_ doesn't—"

Hal pushed him back, hard, and Barry stumbled. Barry, of all people, stumbled. Barry whose feet skimmed the ground, who moved like a gazelle, who practically glided across a room; golden, graceful Barry who Hal had never seen misstep in his life. Barry. Stumbling. Hal frowned. "Are you. . . Barry, are you. . . drunk?"

Barry started laughing. It just made Hal angrier. "Jesus Christ," he said incredulously. "You're drunk off your fucking ass. How much do you even have to drink to get drunk, with your metabolism?"

Barry was still quietly laughing. "You wouldn't even believe me if I told you."

"You didn't just get drunk tonight," Hal said. With a small snick, every piece fell in place. "You've been drunk a while."

"More or less," Barry said. "I tried going to one of those meetings, with the. . . people, and the. . . I don't know, not really my scene. Sobriety is. . . probably not for me." He was leaning against the brick wall, his head tipped back. 

"Is that what happened," Hal said. "Is that why you were fucking around on Iris, because you were drinking?"

Barry rolled his head to the side, like he was looking at something out across the bay. "Did you ever just want not to feel things?"

"Pretty much all the goddamn time. Barry. Listen to me. This is. . . I can help you, all right? We can fix this. You can fix this."

Barry was laughing again, just a long low steady laugh. "A little too late for that. My life is fucked beyond repair, and you know it."

Even when he saw the truth, it was hard to arrange it in the right order in his head. At first he had thought Barry was drinking because his life had turned to shit, but the equation was suddenly much clearer when you turned that sentence around. Silently Hal ran the tally in his head, of what the drinking had cost Barry—his marriage, his integrity, his friends. And no one had seen it, because Barry wasn't a drunk. Barry didn't drink. If he had been here, he would have seen. Or maybe not. He hadn't seen it in the months before his arrest. Why would it have been any different if he had been here?

Hal leaned against the wall beside Barry. The brick was still warm from the day's heat, and scratchy against his back. "This, my friend, is what's called hitting bottom," Hal said. "I've visited a few times before, so I know my way around the place. More important, I know the way out."

Barry bent over, put his head in his hands. "Shit," he moaned. "What the fuck did I just do?"

"A lot of shit I hope you're not going to remember. We might want to go check on Amanda though."

"Who?"

Barry's gaze was bleary and confused, and Hal couldn't help the short laugh. "Okay, good to know. Although not so good to know that you're sleeping with someone whose name you can't remember."

"That's another thing," Barry said. "I'm pretty sure I slept with Clark. I am almost one hundred percent sure that happened."

"Jesus _Christ_ ," Hal said. And this time he slapped his hand against Barry's head, hard. "You did _what?"_

"I—"

"I heard you. For fuck's sake Bar. You went to bed with Clark? _Clark_ , of all people? What the hell were you thinking, fucking _that_ up?"

"I don't know, I—"

He hit his head again, harder. "Fix it," he said. "You're not just drunk, but crazy if you don't try to fix that one."

"I know," Barry said. 

"Good. Now give me your phone."

"For what?"

"So I can get you a cab, idiot. I left my phone upstairs, and no way are you driving home. First thing tomorrow, we're figuring out how to start fixing things, beginning with the drinking. Together. I'm going to be there, every step, all right?"

"I think there are twelve," Barry said, and Hal laughed again.

* * *

And that night was the first night he cried.

He cried for Barry, and the wreckage of Barry's life. He cried for himself, for the months at Watson, for the years before, for the whole sorry mess of his own life. And yes, for Amber—who at some point, before the meth had eaten her, had been a whole person who had wanted things from her life, who had had dreams, who had even, possibly, in some corner of her cratered brain, given a shit about him at some point. For Sol, for the kid guard, for the whole broken lot of them. He hadn't cried since he was eleven, when he had first learned that crying got you nothing but more pain. He cried now like he was bleeding, gross convulsive sobs that tore out of him with no noise but quiet racking spasms, his head bent to Bruce's chest.

He couldn't stop shaking afterward, and Bruce held him so tight it was almost painful. "I never told you," Hal finally said, when he could speak, and Bruce's hand gripped his head, and he said, "Shhh."

"No, it's important," Hal whispered. He was whispering because they were still at Ollie and Dinah's. After the drama with Barry and what's-her-face, Hal had come back upstairs and joined Bruce and Dinah and Ollie for some actual drinking. Except by that time the liquor tasted sour in his mouth, thinking of what poison it was for Barry and maybe always would be, so he had mainly just watched Bruce and Oliver proceed to drink each other under the table, because obviously neither one of them was going to back down from that one. In the end they had all stumbled upstairs, and Dinah had put the two of them in the guest bedroom with an impossibly fluffy bed, and they had collapsed on top of it.

Bruce was lying there with closed eyes, hands carefully folded on his chest, and Hal had said, "What are you doing?"

"Trying not to slide off," he had replied, and Hal had started laughing so hard he was afraid he was going to hurt something. And then somehow he had turned the lights off, and the laughing hadn't stopped, only it was becoming something else, and that was when he had realized he wasn't laughing at all.

"It's important," he whispered again. "The thing is, I realize my mistake."

"What's that?" Bruce's murmur rumbled his chest, and the hand kept stroking his hair.

"I should have killed Buck."

The hand faltered. "No, think about it," Hal said. "Just think about it. If I had done it, I sure as shit wouldn't have had to do it with a hunting knife. And I wouldn't have left the body where anyone could have found it. I could have hurled it into the orbit of Mercury, I could have erased it from existence. If I had done it that night, none of this would have happened. And I would have had the satisfaction of killing that motherfucker myself."

"Probably."

"Wait. Really? You're not going to try to argue I shouldn't have?"

"No."

Hal digested that one in silence. There was a lot they should talk about. Barry, for one thing. But there had been something in the way Bruce had looked at Barry, at the dinner table, that had had nothing of anger in it; it had been something far colder and less forgiving than anger. Barry was probably a discussion for another night. And he was wrung from sobbing like a baby anyway.

"You know what we should do," Hal whispered. 

"Mm."

"We should have sex."

"No, we shouldn't."

Hal raised his head. "What? Are you serious? Why not?" He had never known Bruce to turn down an opportunity for sex, not once. It was a little daunting to realize that he was with someone whose sex drive was higher by far than his own (which was not, after all, negligible) and he knew that Bruce held himself back, when he thought Hal had had enough. So he was surprised at the firmness in Bruce's voice.

"Because this is Oliver and Dinah's guest room."

"So? That's what makes it fun. Come on," Hal said, and he started nuzzling at Bruce's neck.

"Hal. Stop."

"Why?"

"Do you really want to have to explain why the sheets need washing?" 

Hal considered. "So that's the problem," he said. He slipped his hand down to rub at Bruce's crotch. He was still wearing pants. They both were, for that matter. "You know what I love," Hal murmured. "I love feeling your cock through your pants. I fucking love that. I can feel you get a little bit hard when I do it."

Bruce was breathing a bit louder now. Hal smiled. Even more than a firm hand rubbing against his cock, Bruce loved talking. He loved a little dirty talk, Hal had discovered, and Hal was also discovering that he didn't so much mind it himself. Mostly their sex had been quiet, furtive almost. Covered in blankets in the dark, whispers if anything. Lately Hal had gotten more comfortable with a bit of narrating, and goddamn but it drove Bruce wild. 

He shifted so he was on top of Bruce. "I have an idea," he said.

"This idea better not be that we come in our pants. That is a terrible idea."

"You're worried about making a mess, I get that. But. . . what if we didn't?"

"How so?"

He worked a hand in between them and eased Bruce's zipper down, carefully. His finger pushed in the folds of fabric and rubbed at the unearthly softness of Bruce's cock, just one finger, up and down. "I was thinking," he whispered. "What if we didn't spill a single drop?"

Bruce's eyes were on his in the dark. "Hal. . ."

"Hush," he said. "Just. . . let me, all right?"

The bed was an old-fashioned iron bedstead, and Bruce's arms reached up and gripped the metal bars. Then Hal shut his eyes and gave himself to his task. It was strange; this was the one thing he had said he would never, ever do to another man, not ever again. Bruce probably thought getting fucked was Hal's line in the sand—not that they had talked about it. But it was actually this, and he had thought that maybe it would take years for him to work up to this point, and that when he finally did it, it would require concentration on his part, and more than a little bit of effort. He had thought that at best, he would be suppressing his distaste.

He had not thought it would be like this.

Bruce turned his neck to the side, and Hal could feel him trying not to thrust up. Let go, he tried to say with his tongue, and slid down deeper on Bruce's thick shaft. He could feel the small vibration in Bruce's thigh, but what finished him—what really did it for him, what cracked his chest open and turned the pleasant pressure in his balls into a heavy ache—was the small noise Bruce made in his throat when he twisted his head to the other side. Just a small, half-strangled noise. Hal brushed a finger lower, below his balls, rubbing at his crack, and that leg was bent for him in a fucking second, and Hal realized Bruce was going to let him do anything, even if that meant crawling up Bruce's body after this and fucking him, and Hal groaned around the thick mouthful of cock battering at the back of his throat. The groan finished Bruce, who gasped and shook and came, completely without warning. 

Bruce made a noise that Ollie and Dinah had to have heard, and his chest curled half-off the bed. Hal drank him steadily. Bruce fell back, and he could still feel that one spasm in his thigh, beneath his hand. He didn't wait, but crawled up Bruce's body to his neck, which he straddled, and pulled out his cock. Bruce's mouth closed around him, and he tipped his head back, giving himself over to it. He laced his hands above Bruce's on the bedstead. He rode that beautiful mouth to a slow wave of climax, and let his finger brush Bruce's throat as he swallowed. 

"See?" Hal whispered, as he collapsed beside Bruce. "Not a drop."

Bruce was still lying there, eyes half-closed, clearly drifting in a scotch- and orgasm-induced haze. Then his eyes snapped open. "League meeting tomorrow," he said. "Don't forget."

"Aw come on. You guys did just fine without me for a year, I'm pretty sure you can make it another few weeks. Or months, whatever."

"Lantern. It's not a joke."

"I love how I'm Lantern now," Hal said on a yawn. "But not when your cock's in my mouth."

"I'm happy to call you Lantern then too. But you're going to this meeting. The new Lanterns assigned to this sector will be there, and you need to establish a relationship with them, for the good of the League if for no other reason."

"Oh super." Hal rolled over and arranged his pillow, stifling another yawn. His mouth tasted pleasantly semen-y. "Even more things that are none of your fucking business. Because apparently you're now in charge of the Lantern Corps as well?"

"I'm in charge of whatever affects the League's dynamic, and your refusal to acknowledge the existence of new Lanterns is going to be a problem."

"Ah, stick a cock in it."

"Happy to, if you could manage to get it up again."

Hal aimed a half-hearted punch in his direction, which Bruce blocked. The hand that closed around his fist pulled him closer, and Hal draped a heavy arm across Bruce's chest. "Don't wanna go," he murmured sleepily.

"I know," Bruce whispered. He had known, intellectually, that the Corps had assigned two new Lanterns to the sector, and it hadn't really bothered him. On the one hand, it had been a little gratifying to know they had needed two Lanterns in order to replace him. On the other hand, it was hard not to feel a little. . . replaced. Hard not to feel it, when that was exactly what he was.

"I think I could do it," Hal said softly. "If you could. . . if I knew. . ."

"What," Bruce's lips brushed his hair.

"If I knew you were wearing a cock ring and butt plug under the bat suit, I think the whole experience would be a thousand percent easier for me."

The arm cradling him tightened to a strangle, and Hal laughed against the chokehold. Laughed too loud, because Bruce said "hush," sharply, which made Hal laugh harder—somehow the thought of Bruce embarrassed about Ollie and Dinah hearing them was so ridiculously juvenile, because oh no, someone might know the Batman actually enjoyed himself in bed. And that made him think about Bruce blushing over coffee the next morning, which made him laugh harder. Bruce's hold tightened.

"Okay okay, just the cock ring then," he gasped, and Bruce rolled them, crushing him beyond his capacity to breathe. Bruce's body stretched on top of his was the most glorious, oppressive, uncomfortable thing he'd ever felt, and his spleen would likely never recover. 

But Bruce's mouth against his was giving him all the air he needed, and he swallowed hungrily.


End file.
